Question: Do you think we're alone in the universe, or might there be other living things on other planets? Or other universes?

Greg Melia answered on 7 Mar 2016:

You’ve asked two questions here, so I’ll answer them separately.

1) Might there be extraterrestrial life?

To be honest, I don’t know. Life on earth is a very delicate balance (e.g. earth couldn’t bee too close to the sun, or we’d get too hot, etc) but there are lots of other planets out there, so life might have been created somewhere else. If there is life, it could take millions of years for them to get a signal to us though, let alone travel to us, so we may never know.

2) Might there be other universes?

Now this is a really interesting question! Some physicists theorise that there are millions of multiple universes, but they’ve got no evidence for it at all. The reason they think this is because the chances of this universe succeeding after the big bang (and not just e.g. collapsing in on itself, or blowing up, or something like that) were so tiny (for several reasons) that this universe couldn’t possibly be the only one, so there must be millions more that we can’t see.

Personally I don’t go with this theory. Believing in millions of extra universes just for the sake of making one of our theories work? Some scientists think that religious believers are silly for saying that God made the world, because we can’t see God, but we can’t see these extra millions of universes either!