 "Photo: Oscar Chacon")
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Aliens do not exist.
At least not in our solar system, according to guest speaker Ben Zuckerman, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA.
"Intelligent life is curious about us, so someone would have come here long ago," Zuckerman said. "Sunlike stars have passed near our solar system, and no one has come here."
At 7 p.m. Nov. 5, students packed into Room 350 in Holt Hall to the point where the ground was covered with student bodies.
As students sat in any available spots, Zuckerman spoke of how living planets have yet to be discovered. Planetary systems he has looked at have been unfavorable for life.
"We can detect big planets orbiting stars," he said. "But, if you want to detect a living world, it has to be fainter than the sun. We haven't done that."
Project Phoenix has been trying to find extraterrestrial life by analyzing patterns in radio signals since 1995, Zuckerman said. Because no intelligent life has been found, Zuckerman thinks it will fail.
"Project Phoenix doesn't have the capability to find Earth-like worlds," he said. "A better suggestion would be to send a telescope in space to block out the light from the star. It makes the star invisible while searching for planets."
Something like a Terrestrial Planet Finder, a device that looks for Earth-like planets, would help further the search for intelligent life, he said. But Zuckerman doesn't think this will happen for a long time.
"I don't think it'll happen in my life time," he said. "We have no money left over for this because of the war. It's not going to happen quickly."
However, some students have different ideas.
Senior Theo Badashi attended the presentation and thinks humans will make contact someday, he said. But only when they have prepared for it.
"We'll meet them when our species is ready," he said. "And only when we're ready as individuals and as a world culture."
But others agree with Zuckerman that humans won't make contact any time soon.
Senior and vice president of the Society of Physics Students Brendan O'Dea attended Zuckerman's presentation and thinks there is life out there but thinks technology is a distance to overcome, he said.
"We don't know where technology is going," O'Dea said. "At its current rate our technology is advancing, there's probably not a chance that we'll be able to reach a planet outside our solar system in the next century."
To reach a livable planet outside the solar system, people would have to look for a planet about the same distance away from the sun as Earth, he said. And it would have to have a lot of water on it.
"It would have to be a certain distance away from the sun so it can have habitual temperature conditions," O'Dea said. "If we're going to look for extraterrestrial life, we'll look for something similar to our planet."
However, Badashi doesn't completely agree with Zuckerman's lecture, he said.
"Some of it was a limited perspective, like for us to assume that civilizations are going to be like us and use similar technology," he said. "Or even to the extent they would communicate with our planet if our sun was close to their sun. To me, that was a big flaw."
Whether life outside the solar system is there, humans still don't know, Zuckerman said. But to bare witness to other life, humans would have to work hard to make it out of the solar system.
"Unless human beings change dramatically, we're going to want to get out there," he said. "We have to make the efforts ourselves. The extraterrestrials aren't going to do the work for us."
Raelene Willis can be reached at rwillis@theorion.com
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