On September 28, 1969 fragments of a meteorite fell in and around the small town of Murchison, Victoria, about 100km north of Melbourne, Australia. The meteorite was found to contain a wide variety of organic compounds, including many of biological relevance such as amino acids.

We could be alone in the Universe after all. The discovery during the past decade of over a hundred planets around other stars has encouraged many scientists to think that habitable planets like ours might be common. But a recent study tells them to think again.

Martin Beer of the University of Leicester, UK, and co-workers argue that our Solar System may be highly unusual, compared with the planetary systems of other stars. In a preprint published on Arxiv1, they point out that the alien planets we have seen so far could have been formed by a completely different process from the one that formed ours. If that is so, says Beer, "there won't necessarily be lots of other Earths up there".

If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades. That is the bold prediction from a leading light at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, California.

Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute's senior astronomer, based his prediction on accepted assumptions about the likelihood of alien civilisations existing, combined with projected increases in computing power.

The chemistry that underlies life on Earth is abundant throughout the universe -- in comets, in the interstellar medium, in the atmospheres of planets, in the outer solar system bodies and in living organisms, an astrophysicist told United Press International.

"If these are made everywhere, perhaps life is everywhere," said Emma Bakes, a principal investigator with NASA's Ames Research Center in California and with the SETI Institute. SETI stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

"You have the chemical foundation spread throughout the entire galaxy," she said. "We're not special. I would bet -- if I had a million dollars -- I would bet that life is widespread across the universe."

The Physics of Extra-Terrestrial Civilizations

To consider habitable worlds, advanced civilizations, and how to find and classify them, Astrobiology Magazine had the chance to discover from Dr. Michio Kaku that the laws of physics has much to say about such possibilities--at least much more than where you might expect speculation to lead you from our tiny corner of the universe.

Dr. Michio Kaku graduated from Harvard in 1968 with highest honors, and number one in his physics class. He went on to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California in 1972, and in 1973 Dr. Kaku held a lectureship at Princeton University. Today, he holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York (CUNY) , where he has taught for over 25 years.

Dr. Kaku is an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and the environment. His most popular and best selling books include "Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the Tenth Dimension" and "Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century", which have been widely translated in different languages. Every week, he hosts an hour-long program, "Explorations in Science", which covers topics in science, technology, war, and politics. Astrobiology Magazine (AM): Can you comment on how physics has steadily moved Earth's place from one of uniqueness (or anthropomorphism) to viewing our position as one tiny corner among possibly billions of habitable worlds available for evolving complex life?

The building blocks of life pervade the solar system, and probably the universe, locked up in planetary polar ice caps, crouching in the interstices of ancient volcanic rocks, zooming around on comets and meteorites, drifting between galaxies in interstellar space, or wafting gently down in cosmic dust.

"The universe is hard-wired to form a lot of the compounds that make life," says astrophysicist Scott A. Sandford of NASA's Ames Research Center. "But that doesn't mean it's happening. There may be a lot of places where the process gets frustrated, and since we haven't seen it on any planet except our own, it's just a story."

Billionaire Paul Allen has committed $13.5 million to support the construction of the first and second phases of the Allen Telescope Array. Construction of the array is now underway at the Hat Creek Observatory, 466 km northeast of San Francisco; the first phase will include the development of 32 6.1-metre radio telescopes. The second phase will see an additional 174 built. Eventually there will be a total of 350 identical dishes built. Once the first 32 dishes are completed, the array can begin scientific operations.

A scheme for classifying advanced technological civilizations proposed by Nikolai Kardashev1 in 1964. He identified three high-level types and defined a logarithmic scale in terms of the power they could muster for the purpose of interstellar communications.

1. Able to harness all of the power available on a single planet. (Estimated 10^16 watts)
2. Able to harness all of the power available from a single star. (Estimated 10^26 watts)
3. Able to harness all of the power available from a single galaxy. (Estimated 10^36 watts)

One tenth of the stars in our galaxy might provide the right conditions to support complex life, according to a new analysis by Australian researchers. And most of these stars are on average one billion years older than the Sun, allowing much more time, in theory, for any life to evolve.

The concept of a "galactic habitable zone" (GHZ) for the Milky Way was first proposed in 2001. Now Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales and colleagues have defined a life-friendly GHZ using a detailed model of the evolution of the Milky Way to map the distribution in space and time of four major factors thought essential for complex life.

Astrobiologists disagree about whether advanced life is common or rare in our universe. But new research suggests that one thing is pretty certain – if an Earthlike world with significant water is needed for advanced life to evolve, there could be many candidates.

Cosmos collaborators, Ann Druyan and astrophysicist Steven Soter, talk about the possiblities for finding life elsewhere and the implications for understanding humanity's own place in the universe.

A bill has been put forward in the United States to designate a day to honour space aliens.
Dan Foley, a Republican from Roswell, New Mexico, the area where some say aliens landed, proposed an "Extra-terrestrial Culture Day" every second Thursday in February.

Mr Foley asked for the bill "in recognition of the many visitations, sightings, unexplained mysteries and technological advances... of alien beings" in New Mexico.

Scientists simulating meteorite impacts on the frozen oceans of Europa have made an electrifying discovery, which raises the chances of finding life on Jupiter's moon.

Jerome Borucki, at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, and his colleagues fired aluminium bullets into a block of ice. They found that when the bullet impacted, sensors embedded in the ice detected an electric shock. A second, and much larger, electrical discharge was observed a few moments later.

I don't think that life such as ours with a lot of water and the carbon chain is more than an ephemeral stage; These mortal frames that last a hundred years must be a very primitive model in the cosmos. I would put my money on the silicon memory bank as an immortal form of life and on the disembodied, or omni-bodied, form as the ultimate residence of mind.
- Robert Jastrow.

David Brin's essay, The 'Great Silence': the Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life can be downloaded at http://www.geocities.com/jeroenvb.geo/brin/silence.html