Are aliens real? Do aliens exist?
A NASA grant enables astrophysicist Adam Frank to search for traces of advanced technology on exoplanets.
In 1995, a pair of scientists discovered a planet outside our solar system orbiting a solar-type star. Since that finding—which won the scientists a portion of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics—researchers have discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets, including some Earth-like planets that may have the potential to harbor life.
These planets may be the key to answering the questions, are aliens real, and do aliens exist?
In order to detect if planets are harboring life, however, scientists must first determine what features indicate that life is (or once was) present.
Over the last decade, astronomers have expended great effort trying to find what traces of simple forms of life—known as “biosignatures”—might exist elsewhere in the universe. But what if an alien planet hosted intelligent life that built a technological civilization? Could there be “technosignatures” that civilization on another world would create that could be seen from Earth? And, could these technosignatures be even easier to detect than biosignatures?
In this video, Frank digs into these questions and more:
Source: University of Rochester
