Aliens almost definitely exist. Here are the facts to prove it

Ramizah Tayiba. 12/04/2020

The human species is intelligent, brave and ambitious but not unique. The building blocks of our existence are the same as those of a beetle, a tree or a star. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur are the foundation of the entire universe. If these unoriginal elements happen to arrange themselves to form life here on Earth, it is more than likely they have done so somewhere else. The foundations of our being can be traced to stars billions of miles away. With new technologies, like the powerful telescopes such as Hubble and the study of spectroscopy, “we are now able to map the abundance of all of the major elements found in the human body across hundreds of thousands of stars in our Milky Way,” professor at The Ohio State University Jennifer Johnson said.

Simple statistics also demonstrate the likelihood of alien existence. There are two billion known galaxies; each galaxy has billions of stars. The Milky Way Galaxy is home to one hundred billion stars, each with hundreds of orbiting planets. These numbers continue to grow after the launch of the Kepler space telescope in 2009, which can detect planets millions of light-years away. Kepler orbits our sun to monitor surrounding stars and compares the data with the observations from ground observatories to process the number of possible planets. Kepler not only detects planets but can detect Earth-like planets that are in the Goldilock zone (a safe distance from the Sun.) According to Kepler’s findings, 40 billion planets have the potential to sustain life. The number of habitable planets can also be estimated by the Drake equation, a famous equation created by astronomer Frank Drake to estimate the potential number of habitable planets in the universe. The equation factors in the rate of expansion of the universe, the average rate of star formation, along with other factors to estimate that there might be 100 million examples of alien life in the Milky Way alone. Furthermore, the number of planets discovered continues to grow. With these numbers, it is unlikely that humans were the only ones who got lucky.

The existence of aliens is sometimes discredited because most planets are too hostile to sustain any form of life. Many argue that the number of planets may be grand, but the number of planets like our own is a little rarer. But studies from our own planet are debunking this notion and proving that life may thrive somewhere else. We are constantly finding life in the most hostile places on Earth (like the nematode worm, a specimen found six kilometers below South Africa’s deepest gold mines). Life has also been found deep in the ice in Antarctica, on top of scorching hot volcanoes and all the way in the deep dark ocean. These specimens are called extremophiles (lovers of the extreme) and can survive in extreme cold, heat, acidity and toxicity. This means it is possible for life to adapt to the freezing temperatures of Neptune, the scorching heat of Mercury, the toxicity of gaseous clouds in Venus and the salty lakes of Mars. Life can sustain itself in the most hostile environments, proving that planets don’t necessarily have to be Earth-like to support organisms. This makes every speck in the night sky a possible home for life.

For many people, the idea of other living beings thriving somewhere beyond Earth seems far-fetched. This notion puts us all on a pedestal of uniqueness. But science, math, and logic ground us. They make us believe that we are not alone. That we are just one small piece of the giant galactic puzzle.

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