• Question: Do you think aliens exist? If so, would they be similar to us? would they be more advanced?

    Asked by AnimalNerd to yoyehudi, Oli, Nina, Kerrianne, Ed on 7 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ed Bracey

      Ed Bracey answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Most likely!
      Think how many stars there are in the universe – it’s a huge number – 1 with 24 zeros at the end of it!
      Some of those will probably have planets that could support life, and some of them life will evolve on. I think it’s highly improbable there aren’t aliens out there.
      However, it would take them ages to reach us!
      They could be like us in that they use carbon as the main components of their body, some people have suggested silicone. If they could reach us, then they would likely be way more advanced technologically.
      It’s quite likely that they will be artificial intelligence rather than biological!

      SETI Scientist: Aliens Are Likely Robotic Life-Forms

    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      I don’t think about this question enough in life..! Overall I reckon there probably is life elsewhere in the universe, but there’s no guarantee at all that it would look like us – after all, we’ve only been on earth for a tiny blip of its history ourselves, so most of life on our planet has been very different to humans. Maybe there’s microscopic life deep under the seas of some of the moons in our solar system, or roaming some distant planet in a different galaxy – who can say!
      And we might struggle to tell how advanced alien life is, especially if it looked very different to us – you probably don’t think of ants as equal to humans, for example, but they’ve been here way longer and they’re also incredibly successful – there might be a million times more ants than humans on the planet, and they’ve been farmers for around 10 million years (9.7 million years longer than modern humans have existed!). So alien life might be very different to us, but if we ever find it we should be very, very careful about judging how advanced it is…

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