Still Searching for ET

When we’re looking for extraterrestrial life, other moons may be our best bet. Among the most habitable alien worlds is Saturn’s moon Titan.

In recent years, the search for potentially habitable planets outside our solar system has increased. NASA’s Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, has found more than 1,000 possible planets so far. BBC News quotes astronomer Dirk Schulze-Makuch as saying, "The first question is whether Earth-like conditions can be found on other worlds, since we know empirically that those conditions could harbor life."

And we’d better take this seriously: Quantum physicist Stephen Hawking says that over the next hundred years, mankind is going to experience a profound environmental disaster, and that our best hope of survival is to do everything we can, starting now, to colonize outer space. The Huffington Post quotes him as saying, "We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.

"Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space."

And why aren’t we out there already? Whitley Strieber found out in 1998, when a mysterious man he calls the Master of the Key burst into his hotel room in Toronto and told him all kinds of things he didn’t know–but when he checked them out later, he found out they were TRUE. One of the few things that Whitley could NOT check out was MOTKE’s provocative statement that we are stuck on this planet because the parents of the child who would have given us the ability to travel into space was killed in the holocaust! You can get The Key from your favorite bookstore or you can order it from the Whitley Strieber Collection (and if you do, it will come with an autographed bookplate designed by Whitley!)