Does Alien Life Exist?
Life is everywhere. At least on this planet. So it’s logical to assume it might be everywhere in the universe, too. But so far we’ve only thoroughly examined one world, so the sample size is a bit small. We know now that the ingredients for life are widely distributed. And we know there are solar systems strikingly like ours our there. “We are here, made of stardust. Therefore, it is at least possible that there are others,” said Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research in California. And there ought to be some smart life out there, too. “Mankind has achieved scientific-technological civilization only in the last 200 years or so, out of about 4.5 billion years of life on Earth,” said Frank Wilczek, a Nobel-Prize winning physicist at MIT. “So it seems we ought to expect there to be many scientific-technological civilizations that have had many millions, or even billions, of years to develop.
