About
A Beacon in the Galaxy to Message ET w/ Dr. Jonathan Jiang, Kristen Fahy, and Stuart Taylor
NASA Exoplanet Archive - data archive operated by the California Institute of Technology
TheGoldenRecord - a collaborative public project to tell the story of the biosphere and send it to the stars.
Article - The Interstellar Probe Will Fly Twice as Fast as Voyager
We are a team of researchers working to demystify the world of extraterrestrial and exoplanetary research using a scientific model-based approach. Our work includes broad themes of human survivability (The Great Filter), exoplanet habitability and studying potential future communication with intelligent life. Our hope is that by understanding more about life as a whole, humanity can begin to bridge the gaps of conflict and strife and determine our shared long-term goals as a civilization.
Is there life on other planets?
Earth is the only planet we know of with life on it...so far. Scientists are searching the galaxy for planets similar to Earth, and signs of life. As we see on Earth, life can adapt to conditions that human beings would consider very harsh (temperature, radiation, salinity, acidity, aridity, etc). So it may be possible that life started on other worlds and adapted to conditions quite alien to what we are used to.
Why have we not found life elsewhere? Where is everyone?
The universe's eerie silence has its own name – the "Fermi paradox." Physicist Enrico Fermi famously posed the question: "Where is everybody?" Even at slow travel speeds, the universe's billions of years of existence allow plenty of time for intelligent, technological lifeforms to traverse the galaxy. Why, then, is the cosmos so quiet?
Meanwhile, exoplanet discoveries over the past two decades have filled in a few of the terms in the much-debated Drake Equation – a chain of numbers that might one day tell us how many intelligent civilizations we can expect to find. Most of its terms remain blank – the fraction of planets with life, with intelligent life, with detectable technology – but the equation itself suggests we might one day arrive at an answer. It feels at least a little more hopeful than Fermi's silence.
Have we found any exoplanets similar to Earth?
Not yet. We haven't found a planet that can support life like Earth. So far, our home is unique in the universe. We have found many Earth-sized rocky exoplanets, some of which are in the habitable zones of their stars. The next step in studying them is to analyze their atmospheres for "biosignature" molecules, which may be a sign of life.