As part of my article about the search for extraterrestrial life, I interviewed Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, about when we'll find ET, why intelligent beings will be artificial, not biological, and why arms and legs make more sense than wheels. Here's the fascinating transcript of what he had to say.
Jennifer Abbasi: How soon do you think we'll find extraterrestrial life?
Seth Shostak: I've said that we'll do it within 20 years, because it's a three-way horserace. Each of these horses has about an equal chance of crossing the finish line first and doing so within two decades.
First, we might just find it within the solar system. There are claims that there are plumes of methane gas leaching out of the rocks on Mars. And that's very strange, because if you release methane on Mars, within 300 or 400 years the sunlight will destroy the methane. So if you're finding methane today, that means something is making it, at least within the past couple hundred years. Some people dispute those measurements, and other people say it can be explained by geology and has nothing to do with life. But there are lots of reasons to think that if you could send a robot to Mars and drill down a couple hundred feet that you might hit a liquid aquifer. You might also find life. When are we going to do that experiment? In the course of the next 20 years, it just might happen. There are other places in the solar system that might have liquid water. To find it requires mounting a big mission with rockets and robots and going to look. The timescale for that is 10, 20, 30 years, depending on the funding.
To read more, click here.