Are there other intelligent species out there?

This is the million-dollar question that everyone wants answered. At the present time we don’t even know if there is life of any kind out on other planets in the universe. Reason would strongly suggest that there is life throughout the universe, and by life I mean even simple life like bacteria.

Astro-biologists study the possibility of extraterrestrial life, terrestrial life being the only life we know about. They have suggested that microbial life could exit just about anywhere, including asteroids and comets. Some have suggested that life could be in an ocean under the frozen surface of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceledus, a moon of Saturn, but none of this has been proven and won’t be until we send a probe or astronauts out there to find out.

Like many astronomers, I believe that life does exist all over the universe because if it happened here it could happen elsewhere, given the right conditions. Unfortunately, we have no concrete idea what conditions are needed to form life. Originally, it was proposed that life arose from the ancient oceans after electrical discharges occurred in the early atmosphere to form organic compounds. Although, it can shown that organic compounds necessary for life can be created by this process, no one has figured out how a complicated molecule like DNA was created. DNA is a chemical abbreviation for Deoxyribonucleic acid, a double helix structure that involves four nucleotides arranged in a seemingly endless variety on a alternating backbone of phosphate and sugar residues, the sugar being 2-deoxyribose. DNA is what makes life as we know it possible.

Some scientists have proposed that life came from outer space. In fact, it has been proposed that we are actually Martians because life formed there first when it had an atmosphere and water on its surface and came to Earth in meteorites that were blown off of Mars billions of years ago.

No matter how life formed here, it could have happened in other solar systems in our galaxy and in solar systems in galaxies throughout the universe. The question is: could intelligent life have arisen on other planets? And, there are plenty of planets out there, probably more than there are stars, and many of them are Earth-like, which means that they have atmospheres and liquid water. Liquid water on a planet’s surface is needed to support life.

One problem I see with current scientific thinking is that we don’t understand what does constitute intelligent life even among the species on Earth. Whales and dolphins have larger brains than humans, and yet we don’t consider them to be intelligent because our idea of intelligent life is what we are and what we have become. I would suggest that if we go to other solar systems looking for intelligent life, we might not be able to realize what we’re seeing because of our human bias. Intelligent life could take on forms that we just don’t understand.

Most people consider intelligent life to be a species that creates a technological civilization. The SETI project involves listening to radio signals from outer space and hoping that an intelligent alien species is doing what we’re doing, which is broadcasting radio and TV signals out into the cosmos.

I just hope that the aliens don’t intercept old Gilligan’s Island episodes. Good grief!

So far, we haven’t found an extraterrestrial species dumb enough to broadcast signals into space. Maybe we will someday, but for now, we have no idea if some sentient being is out there wondering if anyone else is out there.

A lot of UFO enthusiasts think that we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials, but no one has produced convincing evidence for this. My question is: why would a species from a distant solar system spend so many resources to come here? Many have answered this by saying that they are looking for a new planet because theirs is spent. Maybe we humans will be in that situation. In any event, we haven’t had an extraterrestrial land in a saucer and demand to see our leader, so who knows?

Thanks for reading.