• Question: is there a human or some organism in other planets?

    Asked by naresh to David, James, Mike, Suze, Will on 16 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by ladiesman1278, sodiumpolyacrylate, mahin.
    • Photo: James Marrow

      James Marrow answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      No one knows yet. Some scientists think that even if life did develop on another solar system like ours (which hasn’t been found yet), and it was able to travel to or communicate with us that in the immense life of the universe it’s likely that their civilisation and ours would rise and fall at different times, and we’d never meet or ever know of each others existence.

    • Photo: David Ingram

      David Ingram answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      No one knows, but it is likely that out of the billions of stars there are others with planets in the golidlocks zone (not too hot – not too cold) where life has developed. Meeting them without faster-than-light travel will be very difficult and at the laws of physics as we understand them seem to prohibit that. So start inventing warp dirves, hyperspace jump drives etc, which take a space ship out of the known physical universe and allow short cuts to the stars!

    • Photo: Suze Kundu

      Suze Kundu answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Another brilliant question! I really love anything to do with space. It’s my weird geeky interest! There’s a whole area of astrobiology, which looks at potential life on other planets, and the kind of environment that living things would need. There’s a guy at my Uni (UCL) called Lewis Dartnell who does some great lectures on this. It sounds boring if I call it a lecture, but they’re really good. They had some at the Natural History Museum a couple of months back, but he has also written some easy-to-understand articles on the subject, which are great for someone like me that has no idea about the subject in any real depth, so have a Google and see what you find.

      As a bonus, he’s quite good looking – but I was genuinely interested in it before! 😛

    • Photo: Mike Dodd

      Mike Dodd answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      If there are, we haven’t heard from them yet. Would be amazing to find life on another world, even if it was a small organism or a single cell. The impact on science would be huge.

    • Photo: William Eborall

      William Eborall answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      It would certainly seem possible given that life has been found almost everywhere on Earth, even living in conditions that we thought would make life impossible. From boiling under sea vents to lakes of sulphuric acid we’ve found life. The biggest hurdle as David said is finding and reaching them. And even if there is life out there it might be simple one celled organisms – who aren’t that great to talk to.

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