• Question: Are we alone in the universe?

    Asked by anon-187771 to Stewart, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 8 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Kathryn Coldham

      Kathryn Coldham answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      Fantastic question, we don’t yet know! Scientists are on the hunt for Earth-like planets that could be home to life. So they are especially looking out for planets with water and atmospheric conditions that would enable organisms to survive! Hopefully we’ll make some alien friends soon 🙂

    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      We don’t know!

      In the 1960s a woman named Jocelyn Bell Burnell used a radio telescope and found a signal of radio waves with a regular pattern, like beeps. These regular beeps could have come from an alien civilisation, but it turns out that these are actually a type of very dense star rotating very quickly and shining light towards us as they turn, like a lighthouse.

      Other scientists are looking for (as Kathryn said) planets that could support life similar to the Earth, and some people are looking for patterns in the light and radio waves coming from space. So far no signals have been seen.

      It’s possible that aliens know we’re here and don’t want to communicate with us, of course. Or maybe we really are alone in the universe.

    • Photo: David Ho

      David Ho answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      This is a brilliant question, and unfortunately as Kathryn says, we don’t know the answer for sure.

      A lot of people believe that because the universe is so enormous (there are estimated to be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars!) that it’s likely that there is other life out there somewhere. The problem with this is that we don’t know exactly how life came about, so we don’t know how likely or unlikely it is. Even with so many billions of billions of stars, it might be incredibly lucky that life turned out to exist on a planet orbiting one of them. Of course, there could be loads of alien species, but they might be so far away that we’ll never find them, or they might have already come into existence and all died.

      The idea of life on another planet is very exciting — even just imagining what it might be like!

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