New to Astronomy?

Question

How close are we to finding life on other planets?

Why is astronomy not taught heavily in schools?

I have been interested in astronomy my whole life but my life has sent me down another road of majoring in management in computer information systems.

I have a hard time with math and never took calculus. What can I do to get more involved with Astronomy?

Answer 1

Discovery of extraterrestrial life is probably a long ways off. With luck, advanced Mars probes or human exploration, may find life or evidence of past life on Mars, maybe in the next 20 or 50 years. A little further out is the possibility of finding some form of life on Europa or Titan or other moon of one of the gas giants. Life beyond the solar system is much tougher - we have no way of even sending a probe to an extra-solar planet, and are just beginning to have the technology to detect Earth-like planets.

I think the schools neglect it because unlike chemistry, physics, and biology, it has no real practical application. Also, few of the people who go into teaching seem to have much aptitude or enthusiasm for science.

You can enjoy the wonders of the cosmos by becoming an amateur astronomer - no math prerequisites. It can be as casual as scanning the sky with binoculars or as technical as measuring variable star brightness or conducting automated supernova searches.

Answer 2

Hi Daisy -

1. Don't really know. We could be very close to finding simple lifeforms on other planets - or moons of other planets. Possible locations include Mars, Titan, Europa. To speculate and claim it's there without knowing for sure would be irresponsible and arrogant. So we continue to search for absolute evidence as we should.

2. Probably because astronomy is highly specialized and requires a technical background beyond the level that most teachers attain (not all, but most). Similar story to engineering. Most high schools will teach four years of French, two years of speech, English, History - all good stuff - but 1/3 of those kids will go on (we hope) to careers requiring technical skill, and the only high school instruction they will get is chemistry, physics (1 year) and drafting. No structural engineering, no electrical, no astronomy. A few of us are trying to make this better.

3. There are courses in planetary science that require very little math, although calculus is probably still a prerequisite. You can certainly get involved very seriously as a hobby. Seek out your local astronomy club online, go to an observing session / star party. The involvement will begin immediately. You will have a chance to observe all kinds of things through all kinds of scopes - I promise you will enjoy it - especially on a good night with clear weather. See you out there!

Answer 3

1. No-one knows. It could happen tomorrow, next week, or never.

2. Well, there's a lot to learn before you get kicked into the big, bad world. Although judging by some of the questions I've seen on Wacko! Answers, either it isn't taught well or it isn't learned well in some places.

3. How involved do you want to get? As an amateur, like a lot of contributors here? Start by looking up. Then, try to see similarities and differences between different areas of the sky. Then buy a pair of good 50mm binoculars and a good book of star maps and "star-hopping" guides. Then go to a telescope shop (not a department store, and not a camera shop that sells scopes) or a local amateur astronomy club and ask them.

Answer 4

We do not know how close we are to finding life on another planet. Since we don't know where to look, it could be in the next place we look or not in any of the next 10 million places we look. It isn't something you can make progress toward. You have made no progress at all until you find it and then you are all done.

If you are interested in astronomy, just look up. Go outside at night and just look at the sky with your eyes. You might be amazed at what you can see if you just look. People on this form ask why they can see the Moon in the day time or ask what that bright star is or what that line of 3 stars is all the time. These are all perfectly ordinary things in the sky that 99% of the poeple just never bother looking at. But it takes patience. The sky looks boring lots of the time, like the desert. But like the desert, if you look long and carefully and bother to notice things, there is interesting stuff. My grandmother once asked what the really bright star near the Moon was. I told her Venus. She was thrilled. But the next night she called in a panic to say it had moved. She never noticed how fast the Moon changes position from night to night. It had not even occurred to her that that bright star was not just always right next to the Moon. She just assumed it was always there and she had just never noticed it in 60 years. How silly is that? Such a bright star so close to the Moon catching her attention only now after 60 years. It just didn't occur to her that the sky could be changing so quickly and dramatically and she wasn't noticing it. It does.

So look up!

Answer 5

We hope to find life in Mars and Titan now, although most people had abandoned their hope for finding life in Mars, it must be admitted that not all part of Mars have been explored in detailed way that microorganism can be found (well, I can't see E.Coli in the ground when I fly with an airplane, I am sure that even the smartest scientists are the same). Things that worry me is that manned mission may need to be done, to provide definite answer, but have high probability to contaminate the world, thus providing false positive sign for extraterrestial life.

There are a lot of things that need to be learned, and high school students are simply not prepared for that. There are really few high school student who is capable of reading three dimensional map of the universe.

Well, use software made by someone who had mastered calculus as well, for example I have a Newtonian Gravity Simulator, I can send it to you if you want. Hey we are human, we are social creatures, we can't master everything all by ourselves, can we ?

Answer 6

I have no idea why astronomy is not taught in schools. I note that they don't seem to spend much time on spelling, grammar, and arithmetic, either. (not a jab at you)

The best thing to do if you want to get involved in Astronomy is to start looking at the night sky. If you're in an urban area, that will be a problem due to the light pollution from shopping centers and major roads.

This is the index page for NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

You can check each day's new image and you can go back through their archive. Each image has a brief description with links. If you want to know more about the subject, follow the links. I warn you that you might end up staring at that page for several hours at a time.

A good book to begin with is Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. There is one equation in the whole book. The Audobon Society's Field Guide to the Night Sky contains star maps, color photos of objects in the sky, and is an encyclopedic reference for terms and types of objects. The book also has a section on amateur observation, with a discussion on the kinds of telescopes and how they work.

If we don't find any evidence of life on the other planets in our solar system, the only way we are going to find evidence of life on another planet is if someone lands here and introduces himself. We've been listening for intelligent signals with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence for years and we haven't found any. We still might, but it's not likely. Radio transmisions from another planet might be too faint for us to receive. We might also be receiving them and not realize it. Someone who had the ability to travel between stars would be immeasurably more advanced than us, and therefore would have nothing to gain by communicating with the Earth.

But we keep trying on the odd chance that we'll get lucky. Here is a list of ETL projects from SETI: http://www.seti.org/seti/other-projects/
A link on that page will bring you to the SETI home page.

For more fun, and in your field, you can go to this page and see about running UC Berkeley's project to scan signals for signs of intelligent life. It's a shared project that uses your machines to analyze the data.
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

Answer 7

You can always be an amatuer astronomer.Many people are...Well im kinda small to tell you how its done but i know many people are.my cousin is an amatuer astronomer and they have a BIG group working together.30 people.