The search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life beyond our planet is a fascinating area of scientific research with a history stretching back to the Ancient Greeks. Looking for alien life has gone hand in hand with learning more about our universe, with many famous and prominent astronomers and physicists believing that life must exist elsewhere in our universe. Yet it's also an area rife with pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. How do we sort fact from fiction?

This video introduces two of the big concepts in the hunt for alien life: the Drake Equation, which proposes a number of criteria we might use to gauge the likelihood of intelligent life existing in our universe, and the Fermi Paradox, which addresses the absence of evidence for other life forms outside our world and various explanations for why we are yet to encounter alien life.

The search for life offworld has moved from the realms of abstract philosophical pondering, through science fiction, into hard science in the last few decades alone. it was only in the 1990s that we conclusively knew of the existence of other galaxies, or had telescopes powerful enough to identify individual planets orbiting other stars. To date, we know of over 100 planets that meet our best guess criteria for supporting the development of life.

Our nearest planetary neighbours don't appear to host intelligent life, but scientists have not yet ruled out the possibility that living organisms once existed on both planets. Finding conclusive evidence that they did would radically shape our understanding of how life comes into being, as well as the likelihood of finding it elsewhere in the universe. If there is life on Mars, we have a lot to learn from it.

To learn more about Frank Drake, Enrico Fermi and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), visit our blog post about this video: [ Ссылка ]

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Sent Into Space are the Near Space experts.

We use lighter-than-air gas balloons to travel to the upper stratosphere into Near Space, where you can see the curvature of the Earth (Flat Earth believers need not reply!), the black vacuum of space and the thin blue line of the Earth's atmosphere on the horizon.

This is more than just a GoPro on a weather balloon. We build a bespoke launch vehicle for each flight utilising the latest in camera technology and long-range radio and satellite communications. We film HD video of the Earth from space for stunning images of the curvature of the Earth.

With over 500 successful flights over the last 8 years, we're the only company to go to when you want to launch something into space. To find out more, visit [ Ссылка ]

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