Question:
Will we be able to contact other life forms in the future?
Replies:
Hold on a second - what other life forms?
There's plenty of other life on this planet, and we're in contact with it all
the time! But nobody knows if life exists anywhere else in the universe (at
least, nobody has proved that it exists anywhere else). That's the first problem
- we don't know if "other life forms" even exist. There are actually a number of efforts going on to
try and detect radio signals that could come from other civilizations, but so
far there's been no success at that. And who knows if the other civilization
could be so advanced they don't use anything resembling radio any more? Or maybe they never
discovered radio? It's really hard to make a good guess on this. It seems
likely, though, that if there is any other life in the neighborhood of our solar
system, we'll find out within the next 1000 years.
NEWTON is an electronic community for Science, Math, and Computer Science K-12 Educators, sponsored and operated by Argonne National Laboratory's Educational Programs, Andrew Skipor, Ph.D., Head of Educational Programs.