The Final Frontier: Will the search for alien life be over by 2025?

For years, Star Trek and other sci-fi gadgets have lept out of the screen and into our lives. But while mobile phones, video-conferencing, real-time systems monitoring and online collaboration are now staples of modern life,  alien life has remained a fixture in the sci-fi closet.

A growing community of scientists and explorers with ever more sophisticated technology are looking to change that in our lifetime. Since the 1990′s, they have already identified over 300 extrasolar planets -- planets revolving around stars other than our own -- and some of them are said to contain water. Even Jupiter is said to have contained water at some point in its existence.

Read these great articles on the search for alien life:

Discover Magazine: A Scientists Guide to Alien Life: Where, When, and in What Universe?

National Geographic: Alien Life? Astronomers Predict contact by 2025

BBC | Horizon Documentary: Are We Alone in the Universe?

More Video:

NOVA | PBS: The Search for ET (Documentary)

Do We Already Have Evidence of Intelligent Alien Life?

At a recent conference in Washington, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell called on the US government to release what it knows about extra-terrestrial life:

“We are being visited….It is now time to put away this embargo of truth about the alien presence. I call upon our government to open up … and become a part of this planetary community that is now trying to take our proper role as a spacefaring civilisation.”

A 2008 interview with Edgar Mitchell:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhNdxdveK7c

Government secrecy has always been a problem for conspiracy theorists, so why not release all the documentation surrounding contentious incidents such as Roswell and Rendelsham Forest? Perhaps our populace is not ready for such a paradigm shift; then again, perhaps we’ve just making a mountain out of a molehill.

Related Articles

• Aliens exist and UFOs are coveredup by US government says exastronaut (telegraph.co.uk)
• Life on other planets? You bet, says SETI pioneer (seattlepi.com)
• Nasa launches Kepler rocket into space ‘to search for world’s like ours’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• Planet-hunting spacecraft launches (msnbc.msn.com)