"Is there anybody out there?"

The famous line spoken by Pink Floyd has also been wondered by countless people for many years. Is there anybody out there? According to an article on the New Scientist website, a lot of people are thinking that NASA doesn't spend enough time or money on searches to find other forms of life. The article says that the "search for [other life forms of life] is more likely than anything else to maintain public support for space research." I think that NASA is doing the right thing by searching for evidence of life on different planets before spending millions of dollars in huge "flagship missions." The article claims that people would support the search for alien life, but I think that if the search ended without even the slightest discovery of alien evidence, then Americans would be angry that all of their tax dollars were "wasted." The budget for NASA is a huge issue right now, in fact there are many Americans who think that it is too high. The article also argues that "NASA often appears so worried about being seen to be looking for aliens that it seems coy about the whole enterprise." I disaggree with this assertion. In many movies, the people who claim that they have "seen an alien" or "were abducted by aliens" are always portrayed as the crazy people. I think that if NASA were to make it public that they were searching for aliens, then people would be outraged about how much of a waste of money it is. As much as people want Star Trek and Star Wars to happen, I think that deep down we all recognize the fact that if aliens really are out there, we most likely aren't going to discover them in our lifetime.

View the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126957.100-alien-hunt-is-too-exciting-to-ignore.html