Man's date with alien in two decades!

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Alien contact could be sooner than you think for leading astronomers claim that man will make contact with intelligent aliens within two decades. "Everything has caused us to become more optimistic. We really believe that in the next 20 years or so, we are going to learn a great deal more about life beyond Earth and very likely we will have detected life and perhaps even intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, "76-year-old American astrophysicist Frank Drake, who founded the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project (SETI) in 1961, told the BBC.

"There are 200 billion stars just in our galaxy and at least half of them probably have planets (orbiting them), so that's 100 billion planetary systems with, let's say, five planets in each system," The Daily Telegraph quoted SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak, based in California, as saying.

"That's 500 billion planets out there - and bear in mind there are 100 billion other galaxies. To think this (the Earth) is the only place where anything interesting is happening, you have got to be really audacious to take that point of view," he added.

NASA will next year launch its Kepler space telescope, which will constantly scan the same 100,000 stars over its entire four-year mission to discover Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones around suns. SETI will then focus its deep-space listening equipment on those solar systems.