Some Thoughts on Aliens

This week NASA announced that they had found proof that frozen water existed on the planet Mercury.

As most people will know, Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun in our Solar System. This means that the temperatures on the planet surface are extremely hot, so how can frozen water exist on this same surface?

Not only this, but NASA also says that there is evidence of organic materials that are the building blocks of life.

First let’s look at the ice situation.

It would appear that some places on the planet’s surface, near the poles, are in permanent shadow. It is in these places that NASA estimate that there could be as much as between 100 billion to 1 trillion cubic tones of water ice.

Secondly, they say that the evidence of life creating organisms on the planet, would lead them to speculate that life creating organisms probably exist on most of the planets.

Their theory is that this water and the organisms were deposited on the planets from Comet impacts.

In our Galaxy, Earth is a relatively young planet in our relatively young Solar System.

Last year a Astrophysics professor and a Mathematician, estimated that if on one of the older planets in an older solar system, within our Galaxy, had evolved life at the same speed as Earth, then that intelligent life form, only using nuclear powered space craft, would have had time to of visited all the planets in our Galaxy by now.

This perhaps puts into a little bit of perspective, the time the evolvement of planets takes.

It could also perhaps give a little credence to the ancient alien theorists.

There are almost an infinite number of stars in the universe.

As we know, these stars are either suns or in the instances of those distant stars, they are in fact galaxies.

Which ever way you look at it: it is a lot of suns.

Each of these suns has its own “solar system”. Not all solar systems though have planets but others, like ours, have several.

It has now been estimated that assuming an average of each solar system having just 1.6 planets, then in the observable universe, there is approximately 350 sextillion planets.

Remember, this is in the observable universe. Given that space and therefore the universe are endless, how many must this number be multiplied by to become realistic?

It is believed that all star systems and planets were created in a similar manner. Therefore it is not absurd to believe that if water and the organic material to create life are abundant on planets in our solar system, they would also be abundant in others.

I have already said that our solar system is fairly young in our galaxy but remember: our galaxy itself is young within the universe.

Now that we have a true perspective of time, size and numbers, can we truly believe that we are the only intelligent life form in the universe?

I think that even the religious amongst us must admit that any divine being would, given the time and numbers involved, be tempted to seed more than just one planet.

So, do aliens exist?

If we accept, that given the size of the universe, they probably do somewhere, then we should also accept that given the time involved, Earth could have already been visited.

When we ponder on these things, we must always remember: Absence of proof IS NOT proof of absence.