An interesting article appearing on CNN.com discussing the probability of life existing within the Milky Way beyond Earth. Of course determining if life actually exists on other Earth-like planets is no easy task considering our current level of technology, but it is still interesting speculation.
Back in high school I wrote a short argumentative piece with the premise that it is foolish to assume that life wouldn’t exist beyond our planet. Considering the amazing vastness of the universe, the shear number of stars, and the likelihood of billions and billions of planets, there is no reason to think that our world is an isolated case of something called life developing. Of course, realistically we have to consider that life elsewhere in the universe, or even in our own galaxy, may be very different from what we imagine. The fact that we only have Earth life to work with to develop a good definition of life means that there may very possibly be all sorts of “life” out there that we could not have previously imagined.
All that being said, I don’t think aliens have been coming to visit us or probably ever will. Again, space is huge, really really huge, and even assuming that other intelligent life forms have developed out there, the idea of them being able to travel thousands of light years to visit out planet seems pretty slim.
All around fun to think about, regardless of whether or not extraterrestrial life is ever provine.
