Finding Life Far Away

WHAT MAY ULTIMATELY HAVE BEEN among the most important days of my life, and everyone's life, happened just recently, not entirely ignored, but certainly relatively quietly. Certainly, perhaps the most important question I have been asking since I was a little kid has been, seemingly if not definitively answered. It was confirmed, for all intents and purposes, that indeed we the living on planet Earth are not alone in the vast universe, that there is indeed life on other planets in other solar systems. There are probably many people who would like to know this, but havent heard about it yet, because it was only briefly mentioned in the mainstream media. Over the next few weeks, months, and years, we will all hear much more about it. If huge, gleaming spaceships had come down out of the sky and landed in Cenrtal Park we would now be having twenty four seven news coverage. When a spectroscopic analysis of the light from a small planet orbiting a distant star indicates organic chemical compounds unique to life on said planet - not so much. It would we are told, be possible for these organic compounds to be present without life beig present, but quite unlikely, If nothing ese, there appears to be a thriving bacterial microorganismic ecosystem on a planet located in the "Goldylocks Zone" of a solar system a mere one hundred and twenty four light years from us. Or, who knows? Maybe the seas of this planet or filled with whales and sharks, or the skies with birds, and the land with reptiles, or maybe, jsut maybe, there is an intelligent speies of humanoid creatures livign their history, perhaps their version of paleolithic culture, or the Roman Emmpire. Or maybe they have reached about the same level of technology we have, and are even now training their telescopes on our sun, looking for planets, and for chemical signatures imdicating life of some sort. Whatever, its exciting for me, becaue for about sixty years, since my grade school chldhood, the question of life on other planets has been of paramount interest to me, and to millions of other people. An entire genre of literature, science fiction, is devoted largely to this fundamental question. Of cousres, wehn"we" found water on teh moon and on Mars we turned our thoughts to water and organic chemicals on planets troughout the universe, and the likelihood that somewhere they had combined to engender life. When you consider the trillions of planetary systems we now are convinced exist, and that now we indeed know that the basic building blocks of life are indeed present on at least one of them and therefore proably many more - it begins to seem that staring at the sky at night looking for UFOs may still be a silly waste of time; but much less so than heretofore. I forgot who said that either there is life in the universe beyond Earth, or there is not, and either possibility is equally frightening, but they certainly had a point. If there is indeed life on one planet beyond Earth, and now we know that there is, then almost certainly there is life on millions of them, and it follows that in at least some cases, the lifeform is more advanced then human beings, technogically. That thought alone is terrifying, especially if you agree with the late Stephen Hawking that extraterretrial life is not likely to be friendly towards humans. But if in fact Eart is th eonly palce where there is "intelligent"life, we had better start getting along better than ever before, because, after all, we have only each other, in an otherwise very lonely universe.