Are we alone in the universe? Or is there life out there ? If there are aliens , what would they look like? These are the questions being debated by scientists gathered at the Royal Society in London to celebrate the organization's 350th anniversary.
Thanks to advances in technology, astronomers are able to detect planets orbiting stars other than the Sun where life could exist . "We will find out if these planets have continents and oceans. Although investigating anything about their type of life will take a difficult path, getting a simple image of them will mean tremendous progress for us," has argued the popular astronomer Martin Rees , who yesterday gave a keynote lecture on the subject. For his part, Simon Conway Morris, from the University of Cambridge, warns that if we find extraterrestrial life forms, we will have to be "prepared for the worst."
This afternoon, physicist Paul Davies, known for his studies on the origin of life, will give a new lecture on the future of the SETI program ( Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence ), dedicated to the search for intelligent life using radio telescopes . In his talk, Davies will try to answer questions such as how beings from other planets might try to communicate with us and how we should respond if that contact is established at some point.
