The search for extraterrestrial life

The search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system is a priority because it is also searched outside the solar system, for example, SETI does the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which basically SETI is currently dedicated to the search for artificial signals from radiofossils, the artificial signals from radiofossils have long been considered to work very well on Earth, it works relatively well to communicate with spacecraft on Mars, even Voyayer which is 22 light hours away, but further away to communicate with another star is somewhat painful, It takes you years to receive, to send a message and receive the response, for example, sending a message to Alpha Centauri to Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star. It would take 4.2 years for your message to arrive there and another 4.2 years for the response to arrive.

It is generally thought that there must be some other type of faster form of communication, if there are advanced technological civilizations that have the capacity to colonize other star systems, perhaps they have invented another type of communication system and that radio is a temporary thing like we use drums or smoke signals for a time until we invent something better, what is believed is that all civilizations will have used radio emissions from time to time at some point in their existence to send messages, just as we do with the television and radio, these emissions will have spread throughout the cosmos and some of them, if they are powerful enough, because the problem is that with distance they dissipate, if they are powerful enough they could be detected, but they would be detected after centuries or millennia of having been emitted, hence the fossils.

Then SETI could perhaps locate a radio signal emitted thousands of years ago by a civilization, a technological civilization, and that is what it is currently looking for. I repeat, radio and television signals dissipate over distance. Luckily, there will be no aliens watching our television programs, but we do sometimes send very powerful radio signals and those could be captured. From time to time, scientists send a more powerful signal. The last one was sent in the direction of the North Star and those could be detected, but within thousands of years from now and that is what SETI is doing right now.

That is the search for extraterrestrial life and we also now have the James Webb and other observatories that will be in the future, capable of analyzing extraterrestrial atmospheres, analyzing the atmosphere of a planet thanks to the light of the star that passes through said atmosphere is possible, that is, the planet passes in front of its star and a small percentage of the light from the star passes through the atmosphere of the planet and with observatories like the James Webb we can capture that light and we can read the spectrum and analyze what gases it has, if it contains a gas composition similar to the atmosphere terrestrial, and it is also a rocky planet with an acceptable temperature because we could say that it is a potentially habitable planet.

If in addition that atmosphere contains biomarkers, that is, gases that are only a product of the activity of life forms, then we could affirm that that planet has life, but scientists currently do not know what a biomarker is, let's get to the point, they do not know it, or they are not clear at all, because in fact I am starting to get a little fed up with the subject, because as soon as a biomarker comes out, a team of scientists comes out saying "We have detected a biomarker on Venus", for example, and another team comes out saying "No, no, no, that could have been produced by volcanoes or geologically."

They have a fairly big battle between them and I don't think there is a concrete and absolutely reliable biomarker right now, there will be, it may be, more research needs to be done, but for now I would put them all in a conclave, I would close them and have them fight until they decide which ones are valid and which ones are not, because the debates they have are brutal, let's wait to see if they agree.

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