by DENNIS OVERBYE
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. — In a building at NASA’s Ames Research Center here, computers are sifting and resifting the light from 156,000 stars, seeking to find in the flickering of distant suns the first hints that humanity is not alone in the universe.
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Right now, humans cannot even summon the money or political will to get back to the Moon, let alone set sail for another star. It would take 300,000 years for Voyager 1, now on the way out of the solar system at 39,000 miles per hour, to travel the 20 light-years, or 120 trillion miles, to Gliese 581, one of the nearest planetary systems; Kepler’s planets are from 500 to 3,000 light-years away. NASA and other organizations, like the Planetary Society, have experimented with devices like solar sails, in which a craft is pushed by sunlight or a powerful laser, and ion drives, in which high-energy particles do the propelling.
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