SETI Success In 25 Years?

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and perhaps the most prominent public spokesperson for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, opined over the weekend at SETIcon that we could well have proof of aliens within 25 years.

Of course, if a SETI search finds an alien signal sometime around 2035, chances are fairly good that will happen within a context of extraterrestrial life already having been established. Continued exploration of Mars could well turn up fossils, if not actual, current subsurface life. Life could also be found in the ocean under the ice shell of Jupiter's Europa or Saturn's Enceladus. Exotic life could also exist on Saturn's Titan.

The Kepler probe could find a population of Earth-like worlds over the next several years. Analysis of those worlds' orbits and atmospheres-- sometimes using more powerful space probes currently being planned-- should allow very good guesses about whether life exists on a given exoplanet. We could even detect possible industrial activity by studying an atmosphere. So, by the time SETI finds a clearly intelligent signal, it may be taken less as a bolt from the black and more as a logical progression of life in the universe.