James Webb Space Telescope to be a powerful eye in search for alien life

Scientists searching the skies for alien life are eagerly awaiting the launch of a new helper: The much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope.

Those involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, members of what is popularly known as the SETI community, see in Webb the most powerful tool yet to gaze into the distant reaches of the universe.

Webb is "an incredibly complex instrument and telescope a hundred times more sensitive than Hubble," Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the SETI Institute, told the Washington Examiner. The James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched into Earth's orbit in 1990.

Webb will be NASA's most powerful telescope yet, built around a 6.5-meter diameter primary mirror composed of 18 hexagonal mirror segments made of beryllium and coated with gold. As such, the area of Webb’s primary mirror — and thus its light gathering capability, will be nearly seven times larger than Hubble and it’s 2.4-meter mirror.

"We can't even begin to imagine how much more we are going to learn," Diamond said of Webb.

Originally planned for a 2007 launch, Webb has seen numerous delays and cost overruns. NASA announced the most recent delay this summer, bumping back the lift-off date to March 2021.

While Webb's main goals include studying the formation of the universe, stars and planets, it is not specifically looking for life elsewhere in the universe. But Diamond notes that when it is up and running, the space telescope will examine various factors that are essential to the Drake Equation, which identifies all the variables relevant to seeking out technologically advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy and estimated their number.

By probing the atmospheres of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, Webb will be able to detect biosignatures, based on the identification of elements and molecular compounds associated with the building blocks of life.

If NASA sees something when scrutinizing atmospheres of planets or moons that would be of interest to SETI scientists, Diamond said that's when astrobiology and SETI communities will "go to town."

"I suspect there will be lots of proposals for time on the telescope to look at exoplanets," Diamond predicted, referring to specific observation requests by his SETI colleagues.

Pointing to exciting scientific finds in recent years, including liquid water on Mars and other places such as the icy moons Enceladus and Europa that have the right ingredients for life as we know it, Diamond expects humanity to find evidence of extraterrestrial life in the form of tiny microbes within our own solar system in his lifetime.

As for life in the galaxy at large, in which astronomers believe there are an estimated hundreds of billion stars and just as many planets, Diamond says there are just too many habitable planet candidates for there not to be life somewhere, including intelligent and perhaps also technological life.

"We are prejudiced by limitations of our own knowledge," Diamond said of the near-unfathomable scale of the Milky Way.

When it comes to possibly finding intelligent alien civilizations somewhere out in the universe, Diamond said "it's a time problem as well as a space problem," since, as he suggests, a given technological civilization might only last or remain detectable for ten thousand years or so. The onset of technology is loosely defined as the invention of radio and manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum. “The last variable of the Drake equation — the ‘L’ variable, is an expression of how long civilizations may last, or remain detectable from the onset of technology. Drake has estimated this value to be 10,000 years. We are about 100 years into our technology phase, and we face a growing number of challenges related to our long term sustainability!” Diamond said.

But the "odds of finding extraterrestrial life only get better" with the wider range of technology at scientists' disposal," including the James Webb telescope, he said.

"It could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week, or in the next several decades," he added.

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