Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2014

27 ASTROBIOLOGY SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2014 The notorious chlorofluo- rocarbons or CFCs for short, included among those responsible for the depletion of the Earth's ozone layer, could turn out to be the key in the discov- ery of advanced alien civi- lizations such as our own, or even older by a few tens of thousands of years. To verify this possi- bility it will be sufficient to wait for the entrance on the scene of the James Webb Space Telescope. etect T he search for extraterrestrial civiliza- tions will be moving to a new phase, which at first sight seems rather promising. So far we had been content to just listen for possible radio messages that intentionally or unintentionally might be sent by aliens toward Earth, but after de- cades of silence all such hopes were disap- pointed. With even lesser commitment we also searched for “intelligent” light signals from around other stars, but also in this case nothing meaningful was detected. Should we perhaps consider abandoning the search for extraterrestrial civilizations? Obviously not, given that this is not in the human’s nature and consequently “if the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Ma- homet must go to the mountain”, or if ET does not want to tell us where he is, it will be down to us to figure out where he lives.