• Question: We know that there is some life form out there somewhere but do you think we will ever find it?

    Asked by lizzie.may to Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 19 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      We are not entirely sure that there is any other life, we assume that the universe is so big that there has to be some sort of other life forms. At the time being it might be easier that other life forms find us then the other way round, as we do not have the required advancements to find new life forms in distant planets. At some point we will find other life forms, but it must be a few millennia away so don’t hold your breath until we do.

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      We’re pretty certain there must be other life out there (though it may not be any form that we would recognise) and it seems rather silly to think we must be the only planet that can sustain life. But (and this is a big but) it will take many many many years (perhaps the rest of human existence) to find it. We’ve looked at “nearby” planets (that are actually really far away!) and that took many years and now we’ve got to start looking further afield to see if we can find any. In short, I doubt we will find any in our lifetime but I hope one day we will find some!

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      It would be astonishingly arrogant for our species to assume that we are alone in the universe; indeed life is thermodynamically inevitable!

      (Sidenote: Thermodynamics says that things – reactions, the universe! – tend to maximum entropy – that is entropy always increases. This is often incorrectly described as ‘disorder’. Life really is quite an ‘ordered’ system, which is one of the reasons the term ‘disorder’ is incorrect. ‘Entropy’ is better described as ‘a way of rearranging something such that it looks the same to an observer’ – the more ways of doing this, the greater the entropy.)

      Life forms are essentially “entropy engines” – we exist to increase the entropy of the universe – consequently life is inevitable!

      Ok, will we ever find it anywhere else? The problem is the distances involved. In order to form, life needs *timeMATOMO_URL The atoms which make us up were once in the centre of stars – remember stars are capable of taking hydrogen, mashing them together to make helium, mashing *them* together to make lithium and berylium, and so on. This is where the elements come from.

      So, for us to be here, a star had to form, do its mashing of hydrogen and then explode, releasing the elements. If the solar system started to form ~5 billion years ago, then there were only 8 billion years from the big bang for any stars to do their ‘mashing’ and make the raw-materials to form a solar system, from which life could eventually rise. You might find it interesting to look at typical life spans of stars – according to wikipedia, most are between 1 and 10 billion years old.

      So Earth may be the earliest opportunity for life to form after the big bang – if that’s the case, then any other life in the universe is there *right nowMATOMO_URL However, as we can only communicate at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years to send a message across the galaxy – and while life would exist for a long time, a *civilisation* capable of communicating barely lasts for 2000 years on our planet.

      Sadly, while there is likely to be life, our abilty to find it is limited by the distance

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