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Asked by anon-270637 on 17 Nov 2020.
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Kirsty Lindsay answered on 17 Nov 2020:
I think there will be. We know that there are extremophile organisms (so things that like to live in extreme environments) on Earth, and some of them have survived in experiments outside of the ISS, so there is a good chance something lives on another planet. We have found lots of planets, something like 4000 exoplanets (planets outside the solar system) have been found so far.
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Joanna Giles answered on 18 Nov 2020:
I do! But it’s not my area of science, so I don’t keep up to date on all of the latest research. I’ve always wondered though!
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Matthew Kelbrick answered on 18 Nov 2020:
Yes I do! Look at the Hubble Deep field image (https://hubblesite.org/image/3886/category/58-hubble-ultra-deep-field), each dot of light in this image is a Galaxy containing billions or even trillions of planets. And this picture was taken of only a very small point in the night sky, smaller than a penny!
So you can imagine how many more planets there are in the universe. Given that the universe is so large I would say that the chance of their being other life in the universe it high, but I’m unsure if this will be intelligent life. It could be microscopic such as bacteria, these could even live on other planets or moons in our own solar system.
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Christopher Marriott answered on 19 Nov 2020:
I think there has to be other life forms out in space. The universe is absolutely huge, with so many different planets, solar systems and galaxies, so I can’t believe that Earth is the only planet which has life on it. I’m not sure if the other lifeforms would look anything like us though, and they could be made up of completely different atoms and molecules to us. One idea is that, instead of being made mostly of carbon like us, they could be made of an atom similar to carbon called silicon!
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Niamh answered on 19 Nov 2020:
Wow! Very cool questions. I would really like to think so.. We are still so limited in our understanding of the physical universe – I’m not a physicist, but from the courses that I have taken it certainly seems it is a possibility that there are multiple universes (although, this is still a hypothesis at this stage). In that sense, and as a biologist, I would not be surprised at all to hear that there are other forms of life out there. Life as we know it needs certain conditions to form – water and temperature being a couple of the most important factors. Planet earth is currently unique in our solar system in that it provides all of the right conditions to allow life (as we know it) to survive.. however this isn’t to say that at other times in the history of the universe, different locations have set the same conditions.
Life is at least in part subject to mere probability – that we are the correct distance from the Sun, that the Sun has the current mass that it does, etc. And these are all conditions that are subject to change. Therefore, if we think of it in terms of mathematical probabilities – then yes, I think it is likely that at some point, somewhere, life has formed or will form, elsewhere. It would be really cool to study how life adapts to slightly different planetary conditions, and whether environments other that what we have here on Earth, are still capable of supporting it. Great questions!
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