2006-11-13
\nBy Andrew Tillotson
\nAthens NEWS Campus Reporter<\/p>\n
Intelligent life is likely abundant in the cosmos, and we will find evidence of it soon, according to one of the world’s top experts on the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life.<\/p>\n
Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., gave a pair of talks in Athens last week about what his organization does to search for alien life, why he believes it is out there, and what might happen when we find it.<\/p>\n
SETI is a general acronym for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” that can apply to any group that does such work, and does not exclusively refer to Shostak’s institute.<\/p>\n
“The bottom line is we will find E.T. in the next two dozen years,” Shostak said. “I’ll bet you all a cup of Starbucks on that.” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” of course, was the name of Steven Spielberg’s popular 1982 film about a lovable alien.<\/p>\n
His prediction of such a specific timeframe relies on statistical projections of how many intelligent civilizations lie within our Milky Way Galaxy, as well as how his institute’s searching capacity will continue to grow exponentially in the coming years.<\/p>\n
In fact, he said each SETI experiment usually gathers more data than all the previous ones combined.<\/p>\n
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