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Asked by Zaynab Rahman to Harriet on 3 Nov 2020.
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Harriet Gamble answered on 3 Nov 2020:
As far as I know we haven’t found anything living in space. At least not yet!
There are lots of missions to visit planets in out solar system to learn more about them and look for signs of life, that might be things which are currently living there or used to many years ago. There are also space missions looking a very long way out into space to find planets which are a bit like Earth where we think we are most likely to find life.
Given how big space is I think there probably is life out there, we just don’t know what it will look like or when we might discover it. You never know, you might be the first person to find life in space!
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Comments
Sam commented on :
Not yet! But we are always looking. We know that life on earth needs water to live, so that’s what we look for in space. Some places close to Earth where we might find life are in the ice caps of Mars, and on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
Tris commented on :
Although no one has found life on another planet – there have been several studies that show micro-organisms and even small animals can survive in space. In particular, something called “Tardigrades”, which are small tank like micro-organisms (I recommend you google them – they look really weird) have been shown to survive in space. In fact there is almost certainly life on places like Mars and the Moon, but only because we put it there when we visited with space missions : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-49265125.
This is actually a major issue and when we visit places we think might have life (e.g. Jupiters and Saturn moons) we need to be careful not to take life from Earth with us. There are people who work as planetary protection officers – whos job it is to make sure that any spacecraft that visit such places are super clean and will not contaminant other worlds with Earth life.
Tris commented on :
Following on from my last comment NASA was recently hiring a new planetary protection officer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-40809566
John commented on :
Nothing extra-terrestrial has been found, but bits of stuff launched into space and then brought back to Earth sometimes have earthly micro-organisms that hitched a ride on the way up and somehow survived exposure to space and then were still alive when they came back down. This is why Mars missions are sterilised before launch. So we don’t take life to Mars and mess up the search for Martian life when the spacecraft get there.
Stu commented on :
Practically? No, no microbes or space beatles or aliens as far as I know.
Geologically? Mars has a number of artifacts reasoned to originate from water flow and the Moon has stores of water Ice on its surface. While both are good conditions for life, it is liquid water that is required… like your bath, or the sea.
Statistically? The Drake Equation got a boost this week with a planetary science estimate of 300 Million rocky planets in the goldilocks zones of our Galaxy. So thats 300,000,000 Earth-like planets:
* times the chance of a planet throwing up Life *
* times the chance of that life being Conscious *
Then Either * times the chance of the conscious life civilisation developing Interstellar Travel (and Coming here) * Or * times the chance of the conscious life civilisation developing Interstellar Communication (and SETI watching for it) *
* times the normalised lifetime of that civillisation (so we can intersect with it) *
Thats the chance something a bit like us will come visit. There are other factors that could be affecting this… What do you think they could be?