Searching for signs of life on other planets is something that can be done from the surface of the Earth thanks to an enormous amount of technological resources. It is true that the probes have a better chance of doing so, landing on other planets and carrying out chemical studies of their surface, but extremely complex programs have been carried out from here for this purpose.
On the one hand we have great telescopes capable of finding Earth-like planets in nearby star systems, but they are the radio telescopes those who can search for radio signals emitted by extraterrestrial civilizations.
The problem is analyzing those signals to find clues that lead to something, which is why it can be used artificial intelligence to analyze large amounts of data, such as telescope images and radio telescope signals, to look for patterns that may indicate extraterrestrial life.
Seeking biosignatures The main objective in this sector is to search for chemical compounds or biological processes on planets or satellites that may indicate the presence of life, since not all life is capable of emitting radio signals.
SETI@home
Surely the most veteran will remember the SETI@home program, a program that continues to analyze data, but does not allow the installation of new instances.
It was a program that was used to help in the search for extraterrestrial life. It was released in 1999 by the University of Berkeley and allowed users of Windows and other operating systems to download and run software on their computer when they were not using it. This software analyzed data from radio telescopes to look for patterns that might indicate radio signals emitted by extraterrestrial civilizations. As more people joined the SETI@home program, data processing capacity increased, allowing more data to be analyzed faster.
Frank Drake, SETI pioneer, died on September 2, 2022 at age 92. He conducted the first SETI experiments capable of detecting radio signals at distances from nearby stars, and his ideas from Frank led to optical SETI, SETI@home, and more recently, when he was 90 years old, Frank helped pioneer PANOSETI.
You can see the status of SETI@home at setiathome.berkeley.edu
PANOSETI
PANOSETI is a proposed project to extend the search range for extraterrestrial life through the use of an optical and near-infrared instrument. The PANOSETI Observatory is a dedicated SETI facility that uses pulsed near-infrared and optical technology to scan large areas of the sky for transient signals that may be emitted by extraterrestrial civilizations.
The project proposes an expansion of the current Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) phase space by increasing the area of ​​sky searched, the wavelengths covered, the number of star systems observed, and the length of time monitored.
You can see the progress of PANOSETI at oirlab.ucsd.edu
POT
NASA could not be missing from this set-up, in fact it has really important projects that, in addition to providing important data in the world of astronomy and astrophysics, help in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Among them we have the Mars 2020 mission, which deployed the Perseverance rover on Mars in February 2021 to search for evidence of past or present life on the red planet, or the James Webb Space Telescope, which is also used to search for organic molecules in atmospheres of planets outside the solar system.
For the future, he plans to launch the Europa Clipper mission, which will search for evidence of life on Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon.
If it weren’t for NASA and its Kepler exoplanet search program, we wouldn’t know of several Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of their host stars, so it’s clear there’s a lot of technological investment in the subject.
