DailyDirt: To Seek Out New Life And New Civilizations...

The search for extraterrestrial life hasn't yielded much evidence that there's anyone else out there. We could be looking in the wrong places or not looking with the right instruments to detect faint signals -- or maybe we're actually alone. But as they say with the lottery, you can't win if you don't play, so we won't find any aliens if we don't continue looking. (Assuming that aliens aren't already on their way to come and get us.)

• If Dyson spheres actually exist (we're not talking about vacuum cleaners here), they might be harder to detect than previously thought. A Dyson sphere around a white dwarf star might be feasible if an advanced civilization figures out how to survive the red giant and supernova stages of a star -- or travel to an existing white dwarf. [url]
• There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and tens of billions with planets in a "Goldilock's zone" where we think life as we know it could exist. Endless speculation doesn't really explain why we haven't seen any evidence of life yet, but it's fun to try to guess what's going on with aliens and what they might look like. [url]
• Optimists in the space sciences predict that we'll find evidence of alien life forms in the next few decades. We may continue to find evidence that habitable conditions exist elsewhere in the universe, but actually finding life could take a bit longer. [url]

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