mcastelaz

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No. I don't know of anyone who has. But, if there is, I would suspect we'd find life either on Titan or Europa. NASA has a plan to send a robotic mission to Europa.

I have always been interested in astronomy. I got my first telescope when I was about 11 years old - I had to shovel a lot of snow to earn the money buy it. I didn't realize that I would one day be working with a 4-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamercan Observatory, or on Mauna Kea, or even today at PARI with two 26-m radio telescopes.

It's always fun to anticipate what the next great leap in technology will be and how it will be used by astronomers. In the 1980's I think the big thing was the advent of electronic cameras. There were a lot of questions about the ability to use them with telescopes and get good calibrated data. So, I did begin imagine their use, but never did expect to see the extent to which they dominate the field today.

30 years ago I observed infrared reflection nebulae - the cocoons of newly formed stars. This was really cool - imagine a star only 10,000 years old! Today I find the discovery of planets around other stars to be really cool.

I'm not I know enough about this to answer your question. But, it sounds like Dr. Degrasse Tyson might be talking about the largest components of our universe being dark matter and dark energy, and matter makes up a very small percentage. So, when you see stars, planets, nebula and galaxies, you are seeing only about 4% of the universe! There is a lot we don't see because it is in the form of dark energy and dark matter. I'm hoping some young scholar will one day figure out a way to "see" dark matter and dark energy!