Extraterrestrial Life

NASA announced plans Wednesday to embark on a mammoth 20-year project to send a spacecraft to Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa as its next flagship mission to search for life elsewhere in the solar system. The mission, which could cost as much as $3 billion, will be managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.

What's the proper conversation starter when greeting an alien? How about, "This is Earth speaking. We would like to know you. Please reply." Less graciously but perhaps more honestly, you might offer, "Down here we are all confused." And by the way, if you do come for a visit, please "don't kidnap us and poke us. We hate that." These are all authentic, if occasionally crack-brained, suggestions for how we might go about opening a dialogue with an alien civilization.

European astronomers announced Tuesday that they had discovered the first planet beyond our solar system that orbits in a "sweet spot" zone where life could exist. The planet, about five times as massive as Earth, orbits Gliese 581, a red dwarf star about 20 light-years from our solar system. The team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists who found the planet estimate its surface temperature at freezing to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a range in which water can exist as a liquid.

Extraterrestrial life may well be so weird we would not immediately recognize it, and scientists looking for alien life should be seeking the unfamiliar as well as the familiar, experts advised Friday. NASA's current approach to "follow the water" works if the assumption is that life everywhere is just like life on Earth -- based on water, carbon and DNA, they said. But the "life as we know it" approach could easily miss something exotic, the National Academy of Sciences panel said.

The search for life on other worlds can be boiled down to a simple maxim: Follow the water. Life, at least the carbonaceous form we are familiar with, loves water. Now, for the first time, NASA is about to land a spacecraft in a place on another planet where scientists are confident water exists. The Phoenix Mars lander is set to blast off from Cape Canaveral early Saturday for a journey to near the Martian north pole.

Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke listed three wishes on his 90th birthday: for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources; for a lasting peace in his adopted home, Sri Lanka; and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings. "I have always believed that we are not alone in this universe," he said in a speech to a small gathering of scientists, astronauts and government officials Sunday in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Scientists are ramping up the search for extraterrestrial life with a powerful array of new telescopes and a refined sense of where to look within the vast expanses of the universe. At the annual conference of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science last month, a panel of experts discussed the key components of life and what it might mean to find them within our solar system -- or beyond.

Hopes, or fears, that the Earth has been visited by alien life forms have been dismissed in an official report by British defense specialists. The Ministry of Defense confirmed a secret study completed in December 2000 had found no evidence that "flying saucers" or other objects were anything other than natural phenomena.

Albert Einstein once famously wondered whether God had a choice in how he created the universe. His unanswered question drives physics to this day. The same question could be asked about the biological universe -- especially now that the rover Opportunity has found signs of ancient standing water on Mars. NASA's search for alien life is based on the strategy "follow the water," and for obvious reasons. The only life we know is built on a scaffolding of carbon that floats in bags of water.

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul G. Allen is giving $13.5 million for research that includes looking for intelligent life in outer space, bringing his total donations to the radio astronomy project to $25 million. Allen, the world's fifth-richest person, announced his latest gift in a groundbreaking ceremony Thursday for the Allen Telescope Array in Palo Alto.