We also have to contemplate Dyson spheres. Mind you, our alien pals may have advanced transportation methods to get here sooner – maybe making use of worm holes or warping space-time. 7 Which is still very far (one light year is 9 trillion km / 6 trillion miles – the distance light travels in one Earth year). 6 Applying factors such as the distance between stars and the conceivable speed of travel, it’s been calculated that the nearest potential alien life is within 20 light-years away. A space craft like NASA’s Voyager-1, travelling at 17.3 km/s (10.5 miles per second), would take 73,000 years to reach our nearest neighbouring star. The universe, as you may have heard, is big. A massive variety of creatures can exist and thrive on this planet, and just as readily die out and vanish. Instead, a whole new range of creatures evolved, suggesting there’s not one, singular, optimum form for life on Earth to take. Once upon a time, the whole place was teeming with dinosaurs – but when they died out, they weren’t replaced with more dinosaurs. However, we also know that whilst life on our planet began relatively soon after Earth was formed, it evolved in many different ways. So, this would suggest that, if these conditions are replicated elsewhere, life, in some form, could emerge. The elements that make up life on our planet (nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen) are widespread throughout the universe. Grey skin, big eyes, no fashion sense at all.īut is there any logic in aliens looking like this? Would they have the traditional grey skin and big eyes?īut if there is life out there, what would it look like? We’ve all heard stories of close encounters – usually on a rural road somewhere in the American Midwest – where the aliens witnessed tend to have a fairly uniform look. Solutions to the paradox range from the theory that alien life may not be advanced enough to make contact yet, to the suggestion that aliens maybe don’t want to have anything to do with us. He formulated the Fermi Paradox to describe this apparent contradiction: there was no scientific evidence of extra-terrestrial life, but the probability that it existed was high. The Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi 2 was puzzled that alien life had not been discovered yet. With billions of potential receptacles for life spinning out there in space, surely at least one of them is inhabited? And if that were possible, would these potential life forms be capable of extinguishing life elsewhere? 1 And once you consider there could be 2 trillion other galaxies in the universe, then you’re suddenly dealing with numbers so huge they’d even make a mathematician cry. Our galaxy (the Milky Way) has a mere 400 billion additional stars, all doing a similar sort of thing, with a potential 6 billion Earth-like planets orbiting them. Our sun, hanging daintily in the centre of the solar system, is a single star.
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