where is the monolith

The book and the film are based on the assumption that there is life outside the earth. is that so?

By Avi Blizovsky

One of the important protagonists of 2001 Space Odyssey is neither a person nor a computer. It is a huge, black, rectangular board called "the monolith". He has a knack for appearing just when things are getting interesting in the history of human evolution. Because of the way and time in which it appears, the monolith serves as proof of the existence of intelligent life beyond Earth. It won't be easy to find the real monolith. One person trying to find it is Paul Horowitz, head of the SETI program at Harvard University.

Horowitz didn't really expect to find an extraterrestrial memento buried somewhere on Earth or the moon. They are waiting for other signs like radio signals or laser pulses from distant planets. "The way I look at this thing is that it is conceivable that there are other civilizations. It is also conceivable that they wish to communicate. After all we got where we got because of our curiosity, and the communication between humans. It's hard to imagine going back from that."
Horowitz says that space travel is more difficult and requires more energy than communication in space. If you want to travel to the nearest planet with today's technology it will take 50 thousand years. It will be simple to see that advanced civilizations, consisting of intelligent types, have decided that they want to do the efficient thing and they are sending a message instead of the ineffective thing - to send spaceships that do the most ineffective thing - to transport living beings across such huge distances."
"This is exactly similar to the work we are doing at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. The program known as the "Phoenix Program" for at least five weeks a year. Project Phoenix uses the radio telescope to locate transmitters that have been transmitting by aliens.
Another program called SERENDIP relies on another receiver connected to the same radio telescope. He listens all year round, but most of the time the ST Institute researchers have no control over where their institute is. The information collected by Serendip is used for the famous SETI@home project. The information collected is divided into packets and sent via the Internet to approximately 2.6 million personal computers, where it is analyzed. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can search for extraterrestrials. Physicist Andrew LePage (LePage) has written a lot about all STI projects around the world. He believes researchers are doing the best they can with the technology available.

Even with the best technology they can't pick up old TV shows, even if they were sent back to Earth from the nearest planet.” says LePage. The signals of the strongest TV transmitters would be too weak for us to detect.
"We must look for civilizations much more advanced than us, ones that can handle it millions billions times stronger, and maybe even billions times more than our civilization handles." According to LePage, current ST programs have so far only examined a small fraction of the frequencies possible in interstellar communication, and have only examined a small number of stars close to us. He concludes. "There could be millions of civilizations like ours scattered all over the galaxy and we wouldn't know it based on the searches done so far.
The skeptics believe that the reason we have not yet made contact with extraterrestrials is that these beings almost certainly do not exist. This assessment was made by the late Nobel laureate in physics Enrico Fermi in 1950. Fermi is quoted as asking if extraterrestrials are common, why haven't we made contact with them yet? This question is known as Fermi's paradox. In the July issue of Scientific American, astronomer Ian Crawford Crawford of University College London explains the problem. According to him, if there is even one civilization like ours for the milk, it could have easily inhabited the entire galaxy by now.
Crawford's argument relies on the following scenario: a company with rocket technology colonizes two other planets. A few hundred years later, the two colonies each establish two colonies of their own. At this rate, the entire galaxy could be colonized within 5 to 50 million years. This is indeed a long period of time, but compared to the age of the Milky Way, it is the blink of an eye.
If advanced civilizations abound throughout the universe, Crawford wonders, have any of the billions of civilizations, even a single one, left evidence of their presence. Horowitz admits he's worried about this question, but he thinks the math works in his favor nonetheless. "How is that possible," asks Horowitz. "We talk about the chance of advanced life in the galaxy, and we say that the chances are so small that there is only a chance that there is only one such civilization, and guess what? It only happened here. you know. I think the odds of that being true are only one in a hundred
billions.”