While technology still hasn't provided anything like warp drive
to take us to the stars, it has endowed today's earthlings with
tools that were unimaginable in the 1960s - techniques for doing
detective work on objects from quadrillions of miles away. In
the last 13 years, astronomers have used such remote-sending
tools to catalog more than 300 planets outside the solar system.
The first such planets were many times bigger than our own, but
progressively smaller ones have been turning up. In March, NASA
launched a satellite called Kepler, which is seeking subtle
changes in starlight that indicate the presence of little specks
the size of Earth. In the future, astronomers envision observing
even more subtle changes in starlight to analyze the atmospheres
of such planets. The lineup of ambitious projects was causing
plenty of excited chatter among scientists this month when they
met at Baltimore's Space Telescope Sciences Institute for a
symposium titled, "The Search for Life in the Universe." Not
only was NASA