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Recently, Earth received a mysterious laser message from 140 million miles into deep space. The signal was confirmed from NASA’s new spacecraft called ‘Psyche’ suspecting life in outer space as well. There have been many other instances that add up to the conspiracy theory of aliens existing.
In March 2022, NASA said that there are currently over 5,000 exoplanets. As technology advances and allows us to explore farther into space, we could expect that this number will only rise. This implies that there are thousands of planets that are known but have not been discovered yet and there are many more that may contain settings suitable for supporting life but are still to be discovered.
Two astronomers, Carl Sagan and Jill Tarter, who think there may be more life on other planets than our own formed the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute. The goal of SETI is "to explore, understand, and explain the evolution of intelligence as well as the origin and nature of life in the universe." As a research contractor, the Institute collaborates with NASA and the National Science Foundation to pool resources to investigate the possibility of intelligent life on other worlds. In addition to radio waves and optical signals, SETI employs a laser detection system to search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
More than 5,500 exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy, have been discovered to date. However, these discoveries are just getting started; the Milky Way is probably home to trillions of worlds. We are searching for chemical indications of biological activity in their atmospheres on some of these worlds, as well as techno signatures, which are radio transmissions that may be intentionally or unintentionally sent toward us and could be released by intelligent life forms.