“Instead of looking at a few thousand star systems, which is the tally so far, we will have looked at maybe a million star systems 24 years from now,” Shostak said. “A million might be the right number to find something.”
He said that the hunt for alien life is a three way race between researchers looking for advanced, intelligent civilizations; scientists looking at solar system bodies like Mars and Europa for simple organisms; and researchers focused on finding signs of microbial life on nearby exoplanets using future instruments.
