The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a heavily treaded but equally unsatisfying road. Mankind has been attempting to find signs of other life forms in the universe as we know it for as long as it realized planet Earth is neither the center of the universe nor a plane surface floating somewhere in space. But not many worlds that could nurture any life whatsoever have been found so far, never mind ones that could allow species to develop to the point of becoming highly intelligent extraterrestrials.
But mankind continues to hope nonetheless, much too disheartened by the idea that our species may have just been that one happy accident that brought us into existence. And come to think about it, it a very difficult to grasp idea – the enormity of the universe only allowing the ‘flaw’ that created humans to only form in one single place. While scientists are very much aware that planet Earth and its inhabitants were the result of an abysmally low chance and mix of factors, it’s near impossible to consider it was the one and only.
So scientists now attempt to apply a different kind of thinking in their search for intelligent aliens. To be more precise, they start off with the belief that we should ‘put ourselves in the shoes of the aliens’ if we are to find them. By interpolating the very methods we employ to look for other intelligent species, so could other species.
Thus, by making use of the concept of the ‘transit method’, we may end up more successful than before. While there have been a number of ‘habitable’ planets detect via the Hubble Space Telescope or the Kepler Telescope, it’s certain many other have been missed. The transit method is a way scientists can detect previously unobserved planets by studying a star’s small drop in brightness that would normally occur when one of the orbiting planets passes in front of the star.
Scientists believe that as long as aliens exist in a form that is at least as intelligent as mankind, chances are they would employ the same methods of detecting other life forms such as us. In other words, even if they do not use the exact same ways of detecting planets as we do, they are still limited by the same physical principles. That way, by detecting what zones of the universe our planet can be detected that way, we could narrow down our search.
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