• Question: Do you believe that Aliens exist?

    Asked by anon-197474 to Sonal, Rosanna, Matthew, Marleen, Dan, Atreya on 4 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-197475, anon-197621.
    • Photo: Matthew Selwood

      Matthew Selwood answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Without being too much of a pedant, it really depends on your definition of alien. I have no academic standing, and haven’t really researched it much, but my gut feeling is that there is something else in the universe. Whether that will be a microbe or an intelligent species I do not know.

    • Photo: Marleen Wilde

      Marleen Wilde answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Considering the size of the universe, and that we only know or are able to explore a tiny part of it, I think it is likely that somewhere else there has developed life as as well. There might not be everywhere favourable conditions and forms of life might not look like what we used to and probably just are in the forms of prokaryots. But why should the earth the only planet where life could develop? And thinking of all those species that are still to be discovered living under extreme conditions, such as super hot springs, or deep in the sea without light or supply of oxygen, I can well imagine that there is life out there in space somewhere.

    • Photo: Rosanna Tilbrook

      Rosanna Tilbrook answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Yep, I do, and I think most astrobiologists (people who study space biology) agree- but we’re not sure what these ‘aliens’ would look like however. They could just be microbes, or plants, or something else small- we don’t know whether intelligent civilisations will always emerge from evolution, or whether something random happened on Earth that led to us. But, there’s 10 billion stars in our galaxy, and billions of galaxies in the Universe- why should only we exist out here? We’ve found that the building blocks of life (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen) are extremely common throughout the Universe- and we’ve found amino acids, which make up all of the proteins which are essential for life, on comets. If we found life on another planet or moon in our Solar System (which could happen), that would lead us to believe life is very common in the Universe, as we would have two separate examples around one of the trillions of stars.

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