• Question: Do you think Aliens exist?

    Asked by rwn1 to Ailsa, Evan, James, Kath, Ryan on 17 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by assassinskreed.
    • Photo: Ailsa Powell

      Ailsa Powell answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Wow rwn1, you are asking a lot of questions! Keep it up 🙂

      I think there might be every chance that Aliens exist, but not like the ones you see in films and on TV. I think they are more likely to be very small and like bacteria and as a result they may be difficult to find 🙂

    • Photo: Ryan Ladd

      Ryan Ladd answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      People often say – with the billions of stars and planets in the universe the chances for their being alien life is fairly high. Even so, the chances must be very very small!

      I think I’ll only believe in aliens when I see them!

    • Photo: Evan Keane

      Evan Keane answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Hi rwn1. I’ve been asked this loads of times in the live chats and my answer is yes. The chances of their not being any aliens seems to me to be quite low. With 100 billion stars in a single galaxy, and the same number of galaxies visible it simply would be very strange if we were somehow “special”. There is no reason to think we are, and I’m sure there are alien folk on other planets wondering if people like us exist! 😉

Comments

  • Photo: rwn1

    rwn1 commented on :

    But if we have evolved to be what we are now as humans then why isn’t there a chance of life of it on another plannet

  • Photo: Ailsa

    Ailsa commented on :

    I think our planet is pretty special in terms of the types of life it can support. If you look at our neighbouring planets they are certainly less hospitable and couldn’t support life like Earth does. And not every star has planets around it, so you would have to get a planet in the right distance from it’s star to provide the right kind of conditions to support life.

    But you can get bacteria (and bacteria are living things and so are life) that live in very harsh environments that we wouldn’t expect life to be able to survive in. So it may be possible to find bacteria-like life in some of the harsher environments in the universe and it is possible that they could evolve, but it would require a very special planet.

    Does that help?

    Evan will also be able to give you a good answer to this question.

  • Photo: rwn1

    rwn1 commented on :

    Talking of it I wonder if Jupiters moon Io has bacteria on it because they say that there could be life underneath the surface and alien bacteria could be there.

  • Photo: mallfunbunny

    mallfunbunny commented on :

    so love to meet an alien

  • Photo: Ailsa

    Ailsa commented on :

    That’s exactly the kind of thing I was talking about 🙂

    Two more of Jupiter’s moon are also places where they think there might be alien bacteria – Europa and Ganymede. In fact they are testing various probes on earth to see if they can develop one that can be used to go through Europa’s crust to look for life. They could test it on places on Earth like Lake Vostok in Antarctica – which is a lake 4km below the surface of the ice sheet that has been cut off for millions of years – there has been a lot of debate on how to find out what life is in Lake Vostok without contaminating it with microbes from the surface. These are the same problems that scientists wanting to know what’s under Europa’s ice will have to solve.