JOHN

I'd like to meet:

Is there other intelligent life in the universe? We don't know whether or not there is other intelligent life in the universe. There is no reason there shouldn't be. We know by our own existence that the universe is conducive to life. But there are many hurdles to overcome for intelligent life to form, and many threats to its continued existence once it does form. Life constantly faces the prospect of extinction. Life requires energy, water, and carbon; an environmental disaster that removes water, dooms life. Other environment disasters threaten. On Earth we have had huge meteor impacts that are believed to have caused mass extinctions. The harsh radiation of space is blocked only by Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field. Environmental instabilities cause ice ages. One day, billion of years from now, our Sun will burn out. Other, heavier stars end their lives in explosions called supernovae; the blast and radiation from a nearby supernova could destroy all life on Earth.The dark energy will inexorably stretch the universe into an icy cold end. Since we don't know what the dark energy is, this might be wrong, but no less deadly depending on how the nature of the dark energy changes.Many people are engaged in efforts to detect life in the universe. There are two strategies: we look for it, or it finds us. Perhaps a middle ground would be if we detected signals coming from life elsewhere in the universe. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program pioneered searches for life. WMAP itself is, in a small way, a mini-SETI experiment, since it constantly scans the skies over a wide range of microwave frequencies. WMAP was not optimized to search for life. Other efforts are (have been). Some day, we may know for sure whether we are alone in the universe. In the meantime the search goes on, as we also try to understand the universe and how it may be conducive to life.By detecting and measuring the density fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background using the WMAP space mission we are learning about the early universe; and we begin to understand the basic ingredients that make life possible. In the future, we would like to enhance these efforts with other missions, such as NASA's Einstein Inflation Probe, which would strive to detect the gravity disturbances from the era when the universe originally inflated. This passionate search for knowledge is characteristic of human life.