SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has fallen on hard times with current federal cutbacks to space science and research. The downside of these cutbacks is they come at a time when new detection strategies enable us to discover planetary bodies around stars to a distance of about a thousand light years.
Planets that are detected by the wobble of the star imposed by planetary gravity. Planets found by comparing the light values from the transit of the planet over the face of the star. Star light can be analyzed for planetary gas signatures, possibly even the pollutants of civilization. Darn precise stuff is this recent evolution of star gazing.
What we have in these revolutionary methods of finding planets includes “sweet spot” locations, the so-called Goldilocks zone, neither too close nor too far from the solar parent for radiational comfort, better defined as liquid water. The means are available to identify the parent chemistry on the planet, whether or not it has water which in our experience is the main arbiter of life systems.
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