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Are we alone in the universe?

Will we ever find life elsewhere in the universe?

For the longest time, belief in extraterrestrial life was considered a fringe viewpoint, more suitable for sci-fi conventions and fans of Star Trek or the X-Files. Today, it’s the exact opposite. Those who reject the notion of alien life are considered to be the outliers. This change in attitude occurred for several reasons, perhaps none as important as the discovery that exoplanets are everywhere — 100 billion of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Surely, with so many opportunities for life to flourish, the universe must be teeming with extraterrestrials. But is it? Other than Earth, there’s almost certainly no other life in our solar system. Most exoplanets we know of are not particularly hospitable to life. Most stars are incapable of supporting photosynthesis. The reality is that Earth-like planets are probably rare, but that doesn’t rule out E.T. The universe, after all, is a pretty big place. The debate continues.


The existence of extraterrestrial life

“There’s this assumption that we make that because we are alive, we actually recognize life when we see it,…”

“…or we understand what life is, and I think that’s actually a really flawed viewpoint. We really need a more general definition for life that doesn’t depend on the specific chemistry that life on Earth uses but is more characteristic of what life is as a process that organizes chemistry and does all of the wonderful things that we associate with living matter.”


Aliens & Humanity

“Now some people say that we should not try to make contact with them because they could be potentially dangerous.”

“For the most part, I think they’re going to be peaceful because they’ll be thousands of years ahead of us, but we cannot take the chance. So I personally believe that we should not try to advertise our existence to alien life in outer space because of the fact that we don’t know their intentions.”