Only six light-years from Earth, Barnard’s star is among the nearby red dwarfs that represents an ideal target to search for exoplanets that could someday actually be reached by future interstellar spacecraft, says Steven Vogt, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California, Santa Cruz. But the search for evidence of planets around this famous red dwarf star over the past 50 years has been unsuccessful.
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You would have though it was 1938 again following Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds the way the way Twitter lit up last week when the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, Israel-born theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, suggested that an alien spaceship was possibly on its way to Earth to study humankind, and probably had Stephen Hawking spinning in his grave.
Think of beautiful blue planets with endless oceans orbiting many of the Milky Way’s one trillion stars. Could they support life? Perhaps even intelligent life? “There may be life there,” says Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But could it be technology-based like ours? Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy. Maybe life’s inventiveness to get to a technology stage will surprise us.”
