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Asked by 328bera39 to Colin, John, Kevin, Shikha, Triona on 10 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by Emma McCarthy, Roz, 322bera39, claire, 582bera34, leah1104, aileenjcat, Benmacanbeatha, 000_jack, Dylan Density Molumby.
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Kevin Motherway answered on 10 Nov 2014:
(my answer is from my answer to a similar question)
I thinks it’s a statistical improbability that there isn’t life out there: maybe 100,000,000,000 Galaxies with maybe 100,000,000,000 stars in each Galaxy with maybe 3 or 4 planets around each. That’s a pretty enormous number of chances for planets to be in the right zone for water to exists and life to evolve. The real question is though will that be green slime in a pond or walking talking beings with sophisticated culture or even space travel. But the problem is that Space is called Space for a reason, it would appear it’s mostly empty and the distances between stars and planets is huge. Our Galaxy is maybe 120,000 light years across, so if there is life out there even if you had a ship that could travel at light speed would you or your species live long enough to survive the journey to pop over and say hello. And that’s if life is conveniently in our Galaxy. To put in in Star Trek perspective the entire plot of Star Trek: Voyager is that they get magically transported to the other side or “delta quadrant” of the Milky Way farther away than anyone has ever travelled and they’re trying to get back home or the “Alpha quadrant”. In other words Star Trek is set in 100 Billionth of the entire universe. So it’s big. The chances for life are huge, but the chances we’ll ever run into each other or even communicate with each other are also equally massively against it happening. My head hurts for these numbers. I’m going to lie down now.
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Colin Johnston answered on 10 Nov 2014:
I don’t know and nobody else does either.
We live in a huge Universe; 100 billion stars in the Milky Way alone and it seems everyone of them has at least one planet. So that’s a lot of possible places for life to arise.
The vital chemical compounds for life (water and complex carbon compounds) are common through the galaxy.
Life seems to arise very early in Earth’s history when conditions here were still very hostile, suggesting life can form very easily.
So it seems very possible there is life elsewhere in the Universe but there is still no evidence for it.
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Shikha Sharma answered on 12 Nov 2014:
Hi 328bera 39, Emma, Roz, 322bera39, 635bera34, 582bera34, leah1104, aileenjcat
Till date we are the only living creatures in universe. Astronomers are tirelessly looking into every nook and corner of observable universe to find evidence of life. But nothing has been officially found. Though in almost all mythologies, we read the stories of superior life coming down to earth. Even many people believe some of the oldest great structural monuments e.g. Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, Nazca Lines in Peru, Stonehenge, Wiltshire, in England were made by aliens as human didn’t have such advanced technologies at that point of time. However, these are wild guess. We don’t have any scientific evidence to prove it. But many of us believe, one day we will have neighbors from different planet.
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