Dr Anthony Beasley, director of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, has revealed that immense government support is needed to discover alien life that might be thriving in deep space. The astronomer made the comments at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle.
SETI has a huge role to play in discovering aliens
Beasley added that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) should undergo a transition in the coming years, and get integrated into all other areas of astronomy. Interestingly, the comments from Beasley come at a time when one of the private sector funders of SETI research announced the use of the Very Large Array (VLA) observatory in New Mexico in detecting alien life.
The VLA observatory is equipped with multi-antennas and it is widely considered one of the most equipped telescopes in the world.
Dr Andrew Siemion, leader of the Breakthrough Listen science team, a privately-funded project dedicated to discovering alien life, made it clear that a transformation of SETI is pretty much necessary to unveil several mysteries of the universe.
"We would like to see Seti transformed from a small cabal of scientists and engineers in California, isolated from academia to one that is as much an integral part of astronomy and astrophysics as any other field of inquiry," said Siemion, the BBC reports.
Alien discovery to reshape current understanding of cosmos
Siemion added that the search for intelligent alien life should be taken more seriously, and if a discovery happens, it could reshape the current human understanding of the cosmos.
A few months back, Dr Jim Green, a chief NASA scientist, had predicted that the discovery of alien life would be made within 2021 on Mars. Green also made it clear that humanity is still not ready to accept the realities surrounding extraterrestrial existence.
