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Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , .
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Greig Cowan answered on 17 Jun 2014:
Astronomers have found many other planets orbiting other stars (exo-planets). Most of these are large gas planets (like our own Jupiter and Saturn) since these are often the easiest ones to see first. However, as they have gotten better at looking for exo-planets, astronomers have started finding smaller, rocky planets that orbit closer to their parent stars. Some of these exist in the “Goldilocks zone” where conditions are just right for the existence of liquid water on the planets (it’s not too hot or too cold for liquid water to form). It is these planets where we might be able to find conditions suitable for humans to inhabit some time in the distant future. Have a look here:
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Dave Jones answered on 17 Jun 2014:
There are lots of planets but not all planets are like Earth. We have to judge how suitable they’d be on the little information we can discover by observing them with telescopes from very far away. The main things we look for are:
-That they are rocky, like Earth. Many planets are like Jupiter and Uranus, big and gassy, so not suitable for us to build houses and such on.
-They need to be at the right temperature. Water is essential for us, so it can’t be too cold (because all the water would be frozen all the time) or too hot (because all the water would be steam and we’d get burnt).
-It needs to be about the same size as Earth, so that the gravity is about right. Too heavy and the gravity would hurt us, too light and we might just float off into space.We’ve found lots of planets that might be good enough, but we still can’t tell much about whether they have atmospheres with the right composition (plenty of oxygen, nothing that hurts us) or if they have water. The best that we have found so far is called Kepler 186-f, it’s called that because it was discovered by the Kepler satellite around the 186th star and it is the 6th planet around that star (the other planets are called 186-a, 186-b, 186-c, 186-d and 186-e).
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Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 17 Jun 2014:
Apart from Mars, there are few moons of Jupiter that could be good candidates for life (we could maybe live there eventually, however we know there are no human-like life over there):
-Europa (it’s covered in ice, but under there is huge oceans of liquid water and there is volcanic activity – so heat, both essential for life)
-Io (it has an atmosphere and a lot of volcanic activity – again good for the heat, and very interesting chemical elements for life)and moons of Saturn:
-Titan (it’s pretty cold over there, but it looks like it could have hosted life in the past, due to some of the elements found in it’s atmosphere)
-Enceladus (it’s very warm because it looks like it’s core is made of molten rock, and at the surface it’s covered in water ice, under which there are oceans. It also has all the elements essential for life)And like Greig and Dave said already, there are plenty of earth-like planets in different solar systems of our galaxy. Currently people estimate that there are about 8 billion earth-like planets just in the Milky Way (of course, it doesn’t say that they all have the right atmosphere for us to life, but it’s a very large number!)!
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Aimee Hopper answered on 17 Jun 2014:
I dont know about “human lifeforms”. there is definitely life out there, and more than likely there are many places that can sustain humans if we chose/could actually reach there.
Is that life going to be human shaped, I doubt it. It’ll depend on the planet and the resources available. Maybe the planet has very little light, and so the plants dont photosynthesis but use chemosynthesis. They wouldn’t grow tall, so monkeys and apes wouldn’t exist for us to evolve from.
“It’s life Jim, but not as we know it” — Spock!
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