For the last 17 years since setting up his Kingsland Observatory outside Boyle, Co Roscommon, Eamonn Ansbro has been looking for extraterrestrial life.
It’s a pursuit that is easily to mock. Aliens of the popular imagination are green, with pointy heads and fly around in saucers. Their human pursuers are often similarly ridiculed.
Yet, in the last few years the discovery of thousands of exoplanets – planets around other stars – has made the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) a serious proposition.
The problem is that we do not know whether or not extraterrestrial intelligence exists and even if it does we do not know how they are communicating.
The biggest barrier is the distances involved. Even at the speed of light (250,000km a second), a message sent to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take nine years to get there and back.
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