• Question: do you believe in aliens

    Asked by liampm to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 10 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by sasbumble, smithcj18, aliceb, abbley, jamiethedon, doyle, jturner, jollyjones, cerys, primroseeverdeen, howyilms1, tonieastup123, izzypeter, smileysoph, nazia1999, wellsy, igloo23, mawmanjr01, imctaggart.
    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      I don’t actually know. I suppose as a scientist, I have to say: show me the evidence! As a normal person: I think so, but we’ll never meet them, perhaps only be able to pick their radio or TV when it is beamed across space. (Like we have tried to send our radio into space, in the past.)

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      The universe is so big that I believe there has to be some other life forms somewhere.

      There are billions of galaxies with billions of stars in, each with possibly a whole system of planets around it.

      This means that the chance of there /not/ being life anywhere is pretty low, although we know so little about how life originally start that it’s hard to put a number to this. Some people try and do this using something called the Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation) but it’s a bit wooly and all the numbers depend on who you ask.

      If you mean closer to home then I have to take the same slant as Nazim. I asked a clever person (much cleverer than me) the same question once and they told me about null hypotheses. This means that we assume a negative answer – that there are no aliens – until we find evidence to show otherwise.

      It’s kind of like not getting your hopes up so that when we do find aliens it will be even more exciting!

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      I like to think that we’re not alone in the universe given how huge it is. This is the question that Astrobiology (one of the areas of science I’m interested in) tries to answer. We don’t know whether life is extremely rare – only exists on Earth, or whether it will form anywhere where the conditions are right. This is one of the reasons that we want to look for life on Mars. if we find it there it’s more likely we’ll find it on other planets too.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      If you are asking if I believe aliens have ever visited Earth – then that’s a no. However if you are asking if I think there are any aliens in the Universe then that’s a yes. Those are my opinions in both case because of what I know about the size of the Universe.

      The Universe is really big. In fact lets not even worry about the Universe – even just our Galaxy (which is one of billions in the Universe) is really big. We think our galaxy might have something like 200 billion stars, and the best guesses now (based on planets we have detected) are that almost every star might have planets around it. If even a fraction of those planets are habitable (ie. friendly for life) and if only a fraction of those actually develop life there’d still be literally hundreds or thousands of planets with aliens on them in our Galaxy.

      BUT…. our Galaxy is really big. Even the nearest star to us is so far away that light takes 3 years to reach us from it. Put it another way – if you shrunk the Sun down to the size of a basketball and put it in London (and the Earth is then smaller than a pea) the nearest star would still be as far away as California!

      The Galaxy is so big that even communicating with other planets would be tricky. If we sent a message to Alpha Centauri (the next star) and there was anyone there to listen they’d get it 3 years later, and then only 3 years after that could we hope to get a reponse. And that’s the closest one….

      So yes I think aliens exist, and no I don’t think that they visit! 😉

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      I believe that there is life somewhere out there – the universe is such a huge place with all kinds of weird and ancient environments, that it is more than likely that something will crop up that we could call living,

      I don’t think it will be in the shape of big-headed bug-eyed aliens. We have a very human-centred view of what aliens would looks like, but you only have to look at all the different forms of life on Earth to see how different things look. Our biggest problem is to understand how we recognise and alien when we find one, and whether it is even intelligent enough to communicate.

      The hugeness of space also means that it is very difficult for living things to communicate. We can only reach 100 light years away with our signals, and even then it would take 200 years before we could get an answer!

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