• Question: Do you think that it is possible that there are intelligent life forms on other planets?

    Asked by Molly to Cristiane, Nikolai, Richard, Samuel on 18 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Cristiane Calixto

      Cristiane Calixto answered on 18 Mar 2015:

      Good question, but tricky answer…

      I personally don’t think so. Intelligent life form is just so complex that I don’t think it would have evolved twice in our universe. I know other scientists that think differently.

    • Photo: Nikolai Adamski

      Nikolai Adamski answered on 18 Mar 2015:

      I would like to disagree with Cristiane 🙂

      I think that life in the universe is probably more common than we might think. There are billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, each with a couple of planets. In the last months scientists have discovered more and more planets in distant solar systems that orbit their sun in what is called the habitable zone (i.e. not too close and too too far away from their sun). It seems impossible to me that intelligent life is so special that it only occurred once.
      Scientists think that asteroids could be very important in creating life, by carrying microorganisms or at least organic molecules to other planets. I like to think of them as giant sperm impregnating a planet with life 🙂

      Anyway, even if there is intelligent life out there, it will be very difficult to get in thous with it, because the universe is just so immensely vast!

    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 18 Mar 2015:

      Lots of people are asking this question! I am on Nikolai’s side in this one, I think the universe is so crazily big that whatever conditions caused life to happen on Earth must surely have also happened somewhere else. On the other hand, I doubt we will ever actually contact proper ‘aliens’ because the distances are so unimaginably vast we might never find them.

      You never know though, maybe an ET will turn up unexpectedly and prove me wrong 🙂

    • Photo: Richard Simons

      Richard Simons answered on 20 Mar 2015:

      This is a great resource for answering this question:
      http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

      In short, the answer is yes. We can do what is called a ‘Fermi Approximation’ where we use ‘order of magnitude’ method to estimate an answer that we couldn’t otherwise know.

      Doing this, we get the number of 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe; which is a lot. Restricting the search to our galaxy gives the value 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

      So we can say with a fair amount of confidence that there are other intelligent civilisations, though as Sam said, they’re a very, very long way away.

      As an additional thought, there’s also the issue of time, the universe if 13.8 billion years old, and is expected to continue to exist for a very long time to go. We could be very close to a planet which once has or will host intelligent life, but just get there either too early or too late to realise it… quite a lonely thought really

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