Are we alone? This question has been haunting mankind since the time we started looking at the skies. It has been around 200,000 years since the early men first showed up. And since then, we have been searching frantically, as a thirsty man in a desert searches for water, for any signs of our cosmic neighbours. But till now, we have been unlucky. 

We, as a species, are so desperate right now, that even an extra-terrestrial single-celled organism would be an exotic find for us, let alone intelligent life form. After all the efforts that we have put in, without any results to show for it, the question begs to ask itself, are we really a lone ship in this gigantic ocean of a universe? If not, why haven’t we found anyone or better still why hasn’t anybody found us?

Efforts To Find Life Elsewhere

Well, since early times, brilliant minds from all around the planet have been peering into the cosmos for any signs of any life that may be out there. They have been in the hunt for any anomaly that could nudge them in the right direction. 

There have been so many projects in the past and even today that are continually shuffling through hundreds of thousands of planets and galaxies to find evidence of life elsewhere. 

Kepler Mission

Researchers are continuously on the lookout for Earth like planets in the universe. The theory here is that, if they can find a planet with similar conditions to Earth, there is a high probability that life could have developed there too. 

They are using the Kepler Space Telescope for this which has discovered 4000 exoplanets out of which 20 planets have been found to have similar characteristics to that of our Earth.

Now that this discovery has been made, each planet can be looked at more closely and further investigations can take place on whether or not life harbours on these planets. It will all be based on probabilities but it takes one exotic finding which can turn things around in an instant.

Curiosity Rover

The curiosity rover is a car sized robotic rover that is exploring the surface of Mars. It was launched in 2011 and has been scouring the Martian surface for any sign of microbial life. 

Martians have always been a part of our pop culture and it is only fitting that we started to realistically look for life from there. So far evidence of water has been found on Mars and it is speculated that life may have once existed here. 

It is also speculated that life was brought to Earth from Mars by an ancient asteroid.

Stephen Hawking’s $100 Million Project

The project is officially called the 'Breakthrough Project' and includes world’s leading experts and researchers in what will be the most intensive project to find life out there in the cosmos. 

They will be scanning planets revolving around a million stars in the 100 nearest galaxies to earth. The telescopes used for the project are extra sensitive and will be used to scan even the centre of our own galaxy as well as the whole galactic plane.

This is exciting because for the first time many different brilliant researchers are coming together for a common cause and the whole thing is being done on a grand level. 

Project Argus

This project uses 143 radio telescopes in 27 countries to achieve real-time coverage of the entire sky. Basically they are trying to look for any radio signals that maybe coming from outside the earth sent by an extraterrestrial intelligent civilisation to contact us.

Looking for Technosignature

Technosignature is any evidence of the operation of advanced technology used by an extraterrestrial civilisation. This excludes the radio messages which are searched for commonly, throughout the world.

Basically it is a different way of looking for an intelligent civilisation by looking for their technologically advanced structures or activities. It’s like trying to find a person by trying to find his house first. 

Technosignatures may originate from various sources like megastructures such as Dyson spheres and space mirrors or the atmospheric contamination created by an industrial civilisation.

Up until now researchers have been unsuccessful in finding any signs of highly advanced civilisations that may be out there. They have already combed through 100,000 nearby large galaxies for this purpose.

Challenges

We face a lot of challenges on the hunt for alien life. There are a lot of roadblocks that have been cleared out of the way but each day new ones seem to be cropping up. 

Some of these challenges are simply out of our hands and we will never be able to do anything about them. The human race has to advance at a blistering rate for us to ever be able to meet an ET civilisation.

The Universe’s Expansion

The universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. This means that all the galaxies are getting further away from each other every second of every minute. This means that one day every galaxy will be so far away from the other galaxies that it could be virtually impossible to travel such long distances. 

In such a scenario we might never be able to make contact. Humanity would be doomed to loneliness for eternity. Even if we manage to technologically advance ourselves to travel at near light speeds, it would take thousands of years to reach the nearest galaxy. 

And who knows where our alien neighbours reside. It will be a harsh reality but we may have to brace ourselves for the scenario that there is a real chance we might never make contact. 

Technological Barriers

We have come a long way in just the last 100 years than the 1000 years before that. But even with all our super hi-tech toys, we are at the whims of the universe and its laws. We are still at the stage where we talk about going a certain amount faster than the speed of sound. 

Travelling near or at the speed of light isn’t even being considered right now. The distances between planets and stars and galaxies are so huge that we can barely even imagine it in our heads. The number is simply too large for our tiny heads to fathom. 

Only if we could travel at near light speeds could we possibly think about travelling to neighbouring stars and galaxies. The nearest star to earth is the Alpha Centauri and even at light speeds it would take 8.48 years for the journey to and from this star. 

And this is the nearest star we are talking about. The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is at a distance of 2.537 million light years! Even at light speeds, travelling such great distances is simply inconceivable.

Also, we might not even have the proper tools to be able to look for the ETs in the first place. Who knows if we have been receiving signals from them all along but we just didn’t have the means to decode them or even understand the communication for that matter. 

It could be a whole different type of communication method that we simply can’t understand or even perceive with our biological bodies at our current stage of evolution.

Times We Really Thought We Made Contact

The Wow! Signal

In 1977, astronomer Jerry R. Ehman discovered a radio signal that appeared to be coming from the Sagittarius constellation. It had all the telltale signs that it had originated from an advanced civilisation and lasted for 72 seconds. 

Ehman had discovered the signal while reviewing the recorded data and he was so impressed by the signal that he circled the reading on the computer printout and wrote “Wow!” on one side. Hence the name “wow! signal”. The signal could neither be discounted nor decoded at the time and the case went cold.

Alien Megastructure 

So, this is not exactly contact but a potential one. Researchers discovered the star named KIC 8462852 back in 2009 during the ongoing Kepler mission. But recently the start has been the cause of interest for everybody searching for ET life. 

There is a swarm of megastructures revolving around this sun which seems to dim the light coming from the star by as much as 22%. This is an anomaly as it doesn’t fit the usual pattern that we have become accustomed to studying hundreds of thousands of stars and galaxies. 

Even a planet as large as Jupiter would be able to dim the light of it’s sun by only 1%. Researchers, who are mostly skeptical about any ET activities have actually said that this might in fact be something that highly advanced extraterrestrial civilisation would build. A swarm of megastructures around a star. 

Experts have been totally baffled by it and still no viable explanation has come out. NASA, however, believes that it might soon be able to solve the mystery once and for all after launching it’s latest telescope which might be able to have clearer look.

Conspiracies

Have you ever stopped to consider that we may be looking in the wrong direction in our search for alien life? What if instead of looking out into the universe, we ought to look in. By that I mean, looking for evidence on earth itself. 

Several different “conspiracy theories” have come forwards stating a variety of information on alien contacts. Some say that the US government works with them, some say they are our overlords, and some even believe they live among us as shape shifters. One theory even suggests that there is now a third species on earth which was created as a hybrid of earthlings and aliens.

If aliens have already contacted us or the powers that be rather, then the question is not about contact anymore. It becomes a question of disclosure. 

And no matter how unrealistic some of these conspiracy theories may sound, others however make you want to think that something is in fact going on behind the scenes. Nobody knows for sure and everything is speculative.

So, will we ever make contact? Or have we already?

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