seti (Page 12)

An amino acid that is one of the building blocks of life onEarth has been found in deep space. This means that thechemistry needed to create life is not unique to Earth,making it more likely that life exists on other planets. Italso means that molecules from space may have made their wayto Earth and started life here. Amino acids are importantbecause they link up to form proteins, the molecules thatmake up and run our cells.

Lewis Snyder, an astronomer at the University of Illinois,and Yi-Jehng Kuan, of the National Taiwan Normal University,found the amino acid. Kuan says, “We have strong evidencethat [the amino acid] glycine exists in interstellar space.”
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If life is widespread on a planet, its atmosphere should show signs of its presence. The air we exhale has more carbon dioxide and less oxygen than the air we inhale, and in the same way, the combined ?breathing? of all the life on a planet will change the chemistry of its atmosphere. If life exists on the planet, these changes may be large enough for us to notice.

We need to know which gases should we search for. We know the answers for our own world, but predicting how an alien biology might interact with its atmosphere isn?t easy. ?As astrobiologists we?ve got to be sure that we?re not too Earth-centric,? says Michael Meyer, senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
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A message that will be broadcast into space later in 2002 has been released to scientists worldwide, so that they can test that it to make sure it be decoded easily. If the new message was based on language, it would be impossible for an alien intelligence to decode it. So the designers converted a two-dimensional image into a binary string of ones and zeros that can be easily be transmitted as a radio or laser signal.

The image has not been revealed to the scientists who are testing it, and about 10 per cent meaningless noise has been added to the data. Some parts have even been deleted. This degradation of the message is intended to simulate the interference that might be experienced during transmission to distant planets.
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Since the first SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) observations in the 1960s, there have been scientists studying the possibility of life beyond Earth who have little or no formal training in astronomy, physics, or engineering. These are social scientists, with backgrounds in fields such as anthropology, political science, and psychology.

Archeologists may draw on the insights they have gained about extinct human civilizations that now exist only in the writings and artifacts they have left behind. They know that it can be hard to decode languages from these past civilizations, as evidenced by the decades-long process of deciphering ancient Maya hieroglyphs, so we should expect it to be hard to decode messages from extraterrestrials.
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