• Question: do you belive in aleins

    Asked by 379sptm42 to Ollie, Guy, Christine, Angus on 2 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Guy Rixon

      Guy Rixon answered on 2 Mar 2018:

      I believe that aliens exist. The universe, even just the observable bit of it, is so mind-blowingly huge and it’s full of planets. Some other planets somewhere must have life.

      One of my colleagues at the University of Cambridge thinks that we should detect the first signs of like on exoplanets some time in the next 10 years. How wonderful that you and I should live to see that!

      However, Earth-like planets *seem* to be rather rare (ask me again about that in 2030 when the Plato mission is done), so intelligent alien races may be very well spread out. We may never get to meet aliens.

      I *don’t* believe alien travellers have visited Earth. Nice story, but all the “evidence” looks bogus.

    • Photo: Christine Simpson

      Christine Simpson answered on 2 Mar 2018:

      I agree with Guy, the universe is just so, so huge, that it would be absurd if we were the only place life had evolved. There’s loads of cool science being done about earth-like planets, looking for life outside our solar system, I think we just need to be patient.

    • Photo: Angus Gallie

      Angus Gallie answered on 3 Mar 2018:

      I agree with Guy and Christine. The sheer size of the universe with a massive amount of galaxies each containing a massive amount of stars and with many stars having solar systems, surely there has to be a strong change of there being another planet with life? There are many astronomy projects right now which are detecting possible planets using very clever techniques. In the next ten years it seems likely that we will actually be able to see these planets through some very powerful telescopes being designed right now! They will be very far away though!

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