Extraterrestrial Lifeform Discovery Mission
Introduction
The humanity’s aspiration to find out if humans are alone in in this universe or there are other life forms out there have been following people since the beginnings of history. At first, humans made up gods and monsters to explain the manifestations of natural forces unknown to them by that moment. Later, the mythology had been developing and many fantastic, human-like creatures were produced by human imagination. The mention of mythology and religion seems to be something irrelevant, taking into account the title. However, there is a historical connection between these two, at first sight, quite distanced topics. For the course of generations, for the majority of people the world, especially the sky height, around was inhabited by fantastic creatures. The observations of astronomers were among the first beams of science’s light to highlight the objective image of the world. At first, the Earth had stopped to be a center of not only the universe, but even the solar system itself. Slowly, science was building up evidence against the existence of monsters and mystical creatures. Finally, in 1961 the first ever flight to the space where the human being had an opportunity to get to the orbit of the home planet made one of the heftiest blows to the mythological worldview. Human could take a look with his own eyes that there is nobody watching people’s lives from the sky.
However, this did not make a case for the idea of being not alone to fade away. Humanity turned their looks to stars and planets of the systems far away. People still have a dream to meet something intelligent in the outer space, something that ideally would resemble humanity’s own path through the history. If those intelligent life forms have not managed to find humans, it is up to us to make the first step. The present work gives the example of how the hypothetic expedition to find the extraterrestrial life forms could potentially be organized. The aspects covered include the destination of expedition and the justification behind it, the exact parameters of life forms to be applied to the search process and some technological considerations concerning the instruments and the spacecraft that is going to be the base of the whole expedition.
The Destination
First of all, before starting a quest for anything, it is crucially important to know one simple thing: where the whole expedition is about to go. The question about destination of journey is a hard one to find answer to if to be asked in the context of space. The question of destination is the most important in organizing the extraterrestrial expedition as this is the factor that determines the success of the whole project. Even if every other aspect of organization goes perfectly, in case destination is wrong and the planet does not have inhabitants or is unsuitable for life whatsoever, nothing else matters as the expedition fails to fulfill its …
