• Question: Do you think earth is the only planet with life on it?

    Asked by anon-361221 on 24 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Lucien Heurtier

      Lucien Heurtier answered on 24 Mar 2023:

      No. Think about it: all the stars you see in the sky at night are like the sun. They have planets rotating around them. Most of the stars you can see with bare eyes are in our galaxy, the Milky Way. However, with telescopes, we can see that there are MANY more galaxies out there. Even clusters of galaxies with thousands, millions of galaxies in them. If you do a quick counting: imagine there are about 10 planets per star, a billion stars per galaxy, and maybe a million galaxy per galaxy clusters, that’s probably around 10 millions of billions planets in one galaxy cluster!

      I don’t believe that we are so lucky that there is only ONE planet where life is possible amongst so many planets. I’m pretty sure there may be more than one that is a little similar to the Earth, with water, carbon, and a few other things necessary to life on it. Also, it could be that there are other forms of life that we are just not aware of, and that require different conditions than the ones on Earth.

      So no, I don’t believe we are alone in the Universe.

    • Photo: Vicky Fawcett

      Vicky Fawcett answered on 24 Mar 2023:

      I don’t think so!
      We now think that almost every star has at least one planet, and there are billions of stars in our galaxy alone (and billions of galaxies in the universe!!). That’s a lot of planets in the universe! So statistically I think at least one should have life.
      The difficultly is that they are all so far away so it is hard to find life.

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