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Asked by to Thon, James, Natalie, Shaylon on 25 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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James Bell answered on 25 Jun 2014:
Good question and one that has had a lot of people wondering for a long long time (and plenty of people are searching).
In principle, there’s no reason why there couldn’t be life elsewhere in the universe and, given the size of universe (which might even be infinite) it would be really surprising if there wasn’t life somewhere else.
The real question I think is, are we ever likely to meet it? The closest planets that we know of that could support life like our own are about 12 lightyears away (that’s about 110,000 billion kilometres!). We can send messages at the speed of light but it would still take 24 years to send and receive one message and that’s assuming that, at the other end, there’s a civilisation intelligent enough to receive the signal, translate it and send something back.
The sheer size of the universe and the limitations of the speed of light (also known as the cosmic speed limit) means that if there is intelligent life out there, chances are that it is so far away that we could never communicate with it, much less actually meet an alien.
To sum up before I get too science-fictiony 😛 , yes I believe aliens are real, but no, I don’t believe we ever have met or will meet them
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Natalie Pilakouta answered on 25 Jun 2014:
I agree with James that I think it is very unlikely there AREN’T any aliens anywhere else in the universe just because of its size. By aliens, I’m referring to any form of life (it might be tiny, basic organisms the equivalent of our bacteria for example – they won’t necessarily be intelligent creatures). Whether or not we will ever find them and find out what they are like is a different story though!
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