• Question: Do you think that there is life somewhere else in the universe Please answer I would really like to know.

    Asked by whitejack to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 16 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      Yes, chances are there is life in lot’s of

      There are 100s of billions of galaxies, each one containing billions of stars.

      So the chance that there are several planets like Earth are pretty high. And there’s no reason that there can’t be other types of life which exist on different types of planets.

      The shame of it is, it takes 4 years at the speed of light to get to the nearest star – that’s 12 billion miles away – and we’re never going to be able to travel those distances. The nearest galaxy is 25000 lightyears away.

    • Photo: Hayley Smith

      Hayley Smith answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      I would certainly like to think so, would be a bit lonely otherwise, right?

      There’s a thing called the Drake Equation which tries to predict how many civilisations that we might be able to communicate with there are in our galaxy (it’s strange to work out as it’s all down to things you can’t really measure (such as the fraction of supposed life that is willing to communicate…) and all other strange factors whihc are probably all guesses….) but it comes out at about 2.4 civilisations we could communicate with in our galaxy. And as Daniel said, there’s are loads of galaxies…

      Even though it’s a bizarre concept that this is something you could work out, it’s kind of nice to think about, I guess.

    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      I think there could be, but the chance of them finding us or us finding them is pretty slim!

Comments