Astronauts say ET life must exist

We will eventually find life in space. That from the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.

“If we push back boundaries far enough, I’m sure eventually we’ll find something out there,” said Mike Foreman, a mission specialist on the Endeavour, which returned to Earth in March.

“Maybe not as evolved as we are, but it’s hard to believe that there is not life somewhere else in this great universe,” he told a news conference in Tokyo.

Life on earth is pretty resilient and diverse. It exists at nearly every climate, in water or on land. That said, life as we know it requires oxygen, carbon, and water. Certainly no planets in our solar system other than Earth have those building blocks.

Wikipedia has a quick summary of the common explanation of how Earth came to be hospitable to life:

Scientists have been able to reconstruct detailed information about the planet’s past. Earth and the other planets in the Solar System formed 4.54 billion years ago out of the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left over from the formation of the Sun. Initially molten, the outer layer of the planet Earth cooled to form a solid crust when water began accumulating in the atmosphere. The Moon formed soon afterwards, possibly as the result of a Mars-sized object (sometimes called Theia) with about 10% of the Earth’s mass impacting the Earth in a glancing blow. Some of this object’s mass would have merged with the Earth and a portion would have been ejected into space, but enough material would have been sent into orbit to form the Moon.

Outgassing and volcanic activity produced the primordial atmosphere. Condensing water vapor, augmented by ice and liquid water delivered by asteroids and the larger proto-planets, comets, and trans-Neptunian objects produced the oceans. The highly energetic chemistry is believed to have produced a self-replicating molecule around 4 billion years ago, and half a billion years later, the last common ancestor of all life existed.

Although that’s an improbable series of events — as demonstrated by the lack of life around us — it’s not impossible to replicate. Given the vastness of the universe, the odds support the probability that Earth’s rock to life process could be replicated somewhere else. There are billions of known galaxies with innumerable amounts of planets — our galaxy has around 4 trillion.

Since life thrives here in all types and varieties and in all conditions, life on another planet is likely given that they have water, carbon, and oxygen. So even though a planet’s climate may be brutal, life can exist.

That doesn’t mean ET life is sentient, although I would have to believe that humans are not the only form of intelligent life in the universe either.

The sad news is that we won’t find the answer to this question in our lifetime. We will have to travel outside our solar system to find it, which we have neither the technical nor societal capacity to do. A manned mission to Mars will be a tremendous step in that direction though. But keep in mind that it takes 2 years to get there from Earth. So for manned or unmanned missions into deep space to succeed, multiple generations of staff will be required to say nothing of the immense technical barriers that must be overcome.

See also:

+ New evidence suggests life came from space

it would seem the slow shift toward a broader perspective and hopefully global consciousness has begun. with word from Rome now even catholics can “beleive”. the mayan calendar could mark the end our world… as a boundary.