• Question: Why are there no other signs of Life

    Asked by Bartosz to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 8 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      We just haven’t seen any yet 🙁
      Signs of life can range from oxygen rich atmospheres, to specific radio signals. The universe is so big, and we’re so small that finding life is like finding a needle in the worlds biggest haystack. We recently discovered water on Mars which is very promising for Mars’ ability to host life.
      Not that long ago an image came back showing what looked like fossilised bacteria in Mars’ soil. Unfortunately it wasn’t clear enough to say if actually was or not, but we should keep looking!

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      The Universe is so huge! I really think there must be life somewhere out there, but we just haven’t seen it yet. It could be that they are very far from the Earth, or perhaps they don’t have the technology to be able to contact other civilizations themselves, or we may not even know what to look for – as alien life might need completely different things to survive than Earth life does (it may be life, but not as we know it!).
      There is a group called SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) who are searching for any signs of life elsewhere in the Universe.

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      The Universe is so big! It’s quite difficult to find life, especially intelligent life that are willing to spend their resources in communicating out their location!

      Just think after over 30 years Voyager only just reached the edge of our solar system, and there are more star systems just like ours than there are grains of sand on Earth, so maybe just like us, aliens haven’t yet got the technology to reach us or tell us that they exist!

    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      One reason might also be that we’re not looking in the right way. We often search for life which is very similar to humans – so we figure that they’re breath oxygen and radiate heat and maybe produce certain radio signals. But there could easily be some very different kind of life out there, with some other signatures that we just haven’t thought to look for. Hehe, for example in this comic:
      https://xkcd.com/638/
      if ants were searching for some signs of ‘alien life’, they probably wouldn’t discover humans because ants communicate in a completely different way to us 😉

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