Question: Hi Rosanna im a student and i wanted to know do you think there are other living life forms out in the universe and do you think we will ever be able to find them?

Rosanna Tilbrook answered on 14 Mar 2019:

Hiya! Yep, I do, and I think most astrobiologists (people who study space biology) agree- but we’re not sure what these life forms 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.
.
I think we will be able to find them- there’s a lot of people working on this. The best place to look is our own Solar System, as it’s actually possible to travel to these places, whereas we won’t be able to travel to new planets elsewhere in our Universe. We think a few of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter may be a good place to look for life, as they have huge subsurface oceans, and we think water is one of the essential components of life. We also don’t know if Mars may have had life in the past- it certainly had oceans, rivers and lakes like Earth does now!