Extraterrestrials on the Upper East Side?

No, almond-eyed creatures have not been sighted strolling around Tiffany’s or the Waldorf-Astoria; rather, “Extraterrestrial Life” is the subject of a panel Saturday at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute on East 82nd Street.

The chief historian at NASA, Steven Dick, joins a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, Avi Loeb, and others to discuss the basic requirements for life and inquire whether they provide clues to discovering life elsewhere in the universe.

The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination is hosting the program, which features a professor at San Francisco State University, Debra Fischer, who runs a research team searching for “extrasolar” planets. She and her collaborators have so far discovered more than 130 planets orbiting stars other than the sun.

While the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has often involved listening for signals aimed toward earth, Ms. Fischer and Mr. Loeb each approach the question differently.

Ms. Fischer said her research asks, “Is our solar system typical of other solar systems?” She cited the famous Drake Equation, which estimates the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy with which earth might expect to communicate. The equation includes variables such as the rate of star formation in the galaxy, the fraction of those stars that have planets, the average number of planets that could potentially support life, and the percentage of those that go on to develop intelligent life that wants to communicate with earth. Ms. Fischer said her work contributes to investigating one variable: namely, “how many stars have planets like our own.” Finding a planet like earth, she said, is a step in the right direction toward finding life elsewhere.

A technique she employs is to go to an observatory, look at stars through a telescope, and measure their velocity and watch them wobble over time. (Earth makes the Sun wobble about 10 centimeters a second.)

Mr. Loeb has suggested using new instruments being built at observatories in Australia and a couple of other places. He said the search for intelligent life has traditionally focused on high frequencies. “Maybe they are not looking in the right place,” he said. The large array of antennas could be used to listen to lower frequencies — like the ones earthlings use to transmit FM radio signals — from the nearest 1,000 stars. He said the main challenge was not with the antennas, but with designing the software. As to whether there is life on other planets, he said it was better not to have a prejudice one way or another, but instead to “just collect the data.”

The editor in chief of Free Inquiry magazine, Paul Kurtz, said such work is “reputable science,” and is different from the “quasi-religious” quest for UFOs or researching alien abductions using “spurious unconfirmed testimony.”

Ms. Fischer said looking for life on other planets is fueled by the “desire to understand our place in the world.” She said this has been a quiet drive in science, but could not be approached in a meaningful way until recent decades.