Maybe :: Essays Papers

Maybe It is extremely difficult to peer up into the heavens on a dark, clear night and not wonder if there are others, somewhere up there, wondering the same thing. The expanse is overwhelming, even before scientists spout their estimates and approximations. The grain-of-sand analogies don’t seem to say any more than we already know. It’s big. It’s real big. And each pinpoint of light seems to have the same answer for our questioning eyes: Maybe. If you just felt a rush of wonder, a breath of intellectual curiosity, then you just fell victim to an emotional literary technique. Though my intent was not to persuade you to any one point of view on extra-terrestrial life, I was trying to capture your attention as an audience. My attempt was not overly zealous because that would have worked against me. I tried to calculate it so as to engage your imagination without insulting your intelligence. It is a stratagem that is commonly used by those members of a profession based on logic whose target audience has a relatively high level of expected knowledge. Is there life somewhere else in the Universe? We don’t really know. The truth is, we won’t know until we’ve either found life, or we’ve searched every star in vain. Recent technological and strategical advancements have helped our attempt to answer this ultimate question. Though the resulting optimism may precede itself, it is, nonetheless, refreshing. An April 1996 article entitled â€Å"Searching For Life On Other Planets,† published by Scientific American, suggests that we will very likely have answers in the next decade. Making such a speculation without immediately losing all credibility is a feat that this article and its authors accomplish remarkably well. Every text, no matter what the field or subject, must persuade its reader in some form or another. Even small articles, written solely with the intent to inform, must persuade the reader that what they have written is true. Professors Roger Angel and Neville Woolf utilize logical appeal, or logos, during the majority of â€Å"Searching for Life on Other Planets† to obtain this end. That is to say, they created the article using systematic documentation and well-known example.