Can Extraterrestrial Life be Real?

Index:

Scientific Research on Aliens

I would like to talk about the scientific research that is taking place to search for extraterrestrial life.
First of all, I need to specify that there are two tipes of researches that are in progress:

direct research: that goes to discover life on other planets or analyzes evidence found from old expeditions

indirect research: researches that analyze evidence that has come to us directly on Earth, such as radio waves

Direct research

Scientists think that there cuold be life in our Solar System, but Filippo has already talked about this in more detail.

I would like to focus on two meteorites where life was found (or maybe not):

In 1996 something interesting was discovered inside a meteorite that came from Mars: the remains of something that could possibly be a bacteria. But in reality, the true nature of these presumed bacteria is still to be verified, because it could be alien life, but also a random combination of cells.

And now comes my favorite meteorite, the one found in 2001. Two Italian scientists were analyzing some meteorites and made some incredible discoveries inside some of them. They found bacteria in the rocks that remained inactive for more than 2 billion years. Then after extracting these bacteria, these woke up and started reproducing themselves. Of course, everyone was shocked by this discovery, but other scientists immediately denied the news, as it is very likely that the meteorites had been contaminated by terrestrial bacteria.

Indirect research

There is a project called SETI, short for "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence", which deals with the search for ET life evolved enough to be able to send radio signals.

Until now, the most important signal that has been heard is the "WOW! Signal". A scientist working for SETI heard it in 1977. This signal lasted more than a minute but since then was never heard back. We are still not sure what the origin of this signal was, but it cannot be excluded that it may have been sent by an extraterrestrial civilization.

There is another interesting radio wave that i want to talk about. It’s a more recent one, and is very special because it is precise as a clock: you can hear it exactly every 16 days, the first time was in 2018, and it lasted up to 2019. This regularity is strange because usually all of the signals that we receive are unpredictable. A famous scientist said that, even if we don’t know the origin of this radio wave, we can say that the power needed to send a strong signal like this, it’s not something we could do on Earth, so also this wave is a mistery.

Final Considerations

Having said all this, I have some considerations to make. Obviously it could all be a coincidence, maybe those meteorites had really been contaminated and maybe the wow signal was a technical error, but we don't know. The truth is that we would never be sure of the existence of life outside of planet Earth, and so the only thing we can do is to hope that in the future we will solve this mystery. So according to what I said, do aliens exist? Maybe yes, or maybe not.

Alien Life in the Solar System

1° place-Mars: The discovery of liquid water beneath the icy surface of Mars. Is the news that a team of Italian scientists has discovered an underground salt lake on Mars, it seems to be very old. This discovery was made thanks to the Marsis radar.

The masses of salt water have been found under the planet's South Pole ice sheet. These lakes remain liquid due to the very high concentrations of toxic salts called perchlorates.

This was the main motivation for the launch of the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS), which has been orbiting aboard the Mars Express satellite since 2005.

2° place-Enceladus: astroficiers are sure that there is water under the icy crust of Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. The discovery was made by the Cassini spacecraft, launched in 1997 by Nasa.

So this huge underground ocean is rich in liquid water and rocky bottoms where - most likely - rich and complex chemical reactions take place. It is precisely an ocean that is 30-40 km deep below the surface of the south pole.

This would be a very large mass of water, approximately equal to that of Lake Superior, the second largest lake on Earth with an area of ​​82,000 square km

3° place-Europe: one of Jupiter's satellites, the presence of an ocean of water under the icy crust has been discovered on Europa, thanks to the passage of the Galileo probe in the 1997. Europa has a 100 km layer of water, partly in the form of ice in the surface crust, while under it there would be a layer of liquid water.

The subterranean ocean could be composed of salt water and have a temperature close to zero centigrade; it would therefore be environmental conditions favorable to the development of elementary life forms.

Exoplanetes Potentially Habitable

There are 55 exoplanets potentially habitable located in all the universe . They are similar to the earth but we have no info if there is any form of life in one of those planets .

The most famous of those planets are kepler 160 c and b, two planets really similar to the earth . They are distant three thousand light years from the earth. Their star is really similar to the sun , they have more or less the same size and the star of kepler planets has a heat of 300 degrees less than the sun.

Alien Abduction

An alien abduction is a kidnapping of a human by the alien. The abduction is considered a real phenomena by some suoporter of ufology. Numerous people believe that they have been kindapped by the alien and taken in Hidden places.
A lot of this stories about kidnapping are ridicoulos, but some are very credible. most of these stories comes from the 1960s, but the first ones even from the 19 century.

Scientists believe that these stories are most of the time just a figment of these people's imaginations

Aliens in Area 51

Area 51, the popular name for a United States Air Force base, is at Groom Lake in Nevada. The secrecy surrounding Area 51 has helped fuel many conspiracy theories. For example the most famous is the claim that the site hosts an alien spacecraft and the aliens body that piloted it (after they crushed at Roswell in 1947), thought the United States government says that there weren’t aliens at the military base.

An other claim is that some people say that they have seen UFOs near the site, and others say that they’ve been abducted by aliens, and even experimented, before being returned to Earth, so probably not all of the information that we have are true.

In 1989 Robert Lazar said he had worked on alien technology inside Area 51, he claimed to have seen medical photograph of aliens and that the government used facility to examine UFOs.

On the 20th September 2019 there were an American Facebook event called “Strom Area 51” created by Matty Roberts on June 27 of the same year. It would involve raiding in the site to find out some news of aliens and to disclose some possible conspiracies that are hidden in Area 51. More than 1.5 million people agree with this petition. But after that this event attracted widespread media reaction Roberts declared that his intension was only comedy.

Area 51 is a protected military base but a pilot, Gabriel Zeofman, took some pictures of the site at Christmas day. He shared those photos using a public link with numerous outlets. In the pictures we can see almost all the base where inside it there is an object with a strange shape and really lot of people was anxious to discovered what it was, but no one could tell the true about it.

Aliens in Movies

ALIEN: is a 1979 science fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O'Bannon. The events revolve around an alien species which are predators with intelligence but unable to feel emotions. They reproduce like parasites, that means they live in the humans’ bodies causing their death. There are also sequels and prequels and the last was in 2017.

E.T.: is a 1982 American science fiction film produced and directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Melissa Mathison. It tells the story of Elliott, a boy who befriends an extraterrestrial, dubbed E.T., who is stranded on Earth.

WAR OF THE WORLDS: Another science fiction action film directed by Steven Spielberg is War of the Worlds in 2005. Written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp. The film talks about huge extraterrestrials invade the Earth and devastate cities.

AVATAR: is a 2009 American epic science fiction film directed, written and produced by James Cameron. The film is set in the mid-22nd century when humans are colonizing Pandora, a lush habitable moon. And the expansion of the mining colony threatens a local tribe of Na'vi, a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora.

LIFE: is a 2017 American science fiction horror film directed by Daniel Espinosa, written by Rhett Reese. The story tells a six-member crew of the International Space Station that uncovers the first evidence of life on Mars.

Research by Rossana Nodari, Filippo Rossetti, Tommaso Tonini, Emma Pollacchini, Le Yi Yang