Confirmation of alien life possible in 20 years, says Russian astronomer

Russian scientists hope that humanity is faced with alien civilizations for the next two decades, a Russian astronomer said Monday. "The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms. (...) Life exists on other planets and we will find it within 20 years," said Andrei Finkelstein, director of the Institute of Applied Astronomy of Russian Academy of Science, according to the Interfax news agency.

Speaking at an international forum on the search for extraterrestrial life, Finkelstein said that 10% of known planets orbiting stars similar to Earth. If water is found, it can also be found in life, he said, adding that the aliens are probably similar to humans with two arms, two legs and a head.

"They may have a different skin color, but even that we have," he said. The Finkelstein Institute is responsible for a program launched in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War space race, to observe and emitting radio signals into space.

"The whole time we were searching for extraterrestrial civilizations and basically wait for messages from space and not the other way," he said.

In March a Nasa scientist caused controversy after claiming to have found tiny fossils of alien bugs inside meteorites that landed on Earth.
Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at the US space agency's Marshall space flight centre in Alabama, said filaments and other structures in rare meteorites appear to be microscopic fossils of extraterrestrial beings that resemble algae known as cyanobacteria.

Writing in the Journal of Cosmology, Hoover claimed that the lack of nitrogen in the samples, which is essential for life on Earth, indicated they are "the remains of extraterrestrial life forms that grew on the parent bodies of the meteorites when liquid water was present, long before the meteorites entered the Earth's atmosphere."