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Asked by anon-209695 to Maria, Sergio, Nick, David on 14 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-209693.
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David Whitworth answered on 14 Mar 2019:
We look for where the planet is around a star and then we look at the make up of the atmosphere. If it contains certain chemicals we can have a pretty good guess that there will be life on the planet. This though is only for carbon based life that behaves and evolves like our planet has. There are some ideas that there could be silicon based life forms, but we don’t know and they would be harder to detect as we don’t know how they would evolve or what atmopheres they could exist in
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Maria Walach answered on 14 Mar 2019:
It depends what kind of life we are talking about: If you are looking for something like humans or animals as we have them on Earth, you would need certain things like water, air, and sunlight. So, we need a planet that is close enough to the Sun to be warm enough (but not too close, otherwise it would be too hot), one that has an atmosphere, and water – it would probably also need a magnetic field to protect its inhabitants from space weather and to keep the atmosphere in place.
As David said – there are variations on the lifeforms – if the species didn’t need air, they wouldn’t need an atmosphere etc.
I guess one way to know for sure, is to send spaceships there to explore, but this is very time consuming and expensive! Most of the criteria, we can check by studying other planets through telescopes – for example what kind of atmosphere they have. -
Nick Werren answered on 14 Mar 2019:
Yeah, so as EVERYONE has said we can look for planets that have a similar make up to ours, this is because certain elements release certain forms of light and we can detect that!
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If we want to detect alien civilisations then we need to look for transmissions. Every television and radio broadcast on our planet is released into space. This means that other aliens could detect us by looking for trying to detect our transmissions! They might have also created massive superstructures – like something called a Dyson Sphere that could collect ALL the energy from a star – we could detect those too!
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Another thing to look for is ROBOTS! Why? Because why would you send a person/alien/living creature into space when you can send a machine that will never die and can survive in space? If we find robots in space, that should be communicating and flying about, then we will know that robots sent them there. This is why detecting transmissions is so important
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