NASA Mission to search for life on Europa

[denilson200]

It’s a near certainty that life exists on other planets (not just maybe Proxima B) but many other planets.

The only way that this isn’t true is if there’s a god who has only decided to create one planet with life.

That blue dot ? It’s 200 light years (A light year is 5.88 trillion miles or 9.5 trillion km) in diameter. It happens to represent how far all of our radio communications have travelled through space… ever.

This is how far they’ve gotten after two hundred years travelling at the speed of light (186,000 miles a sec)



Our galaxy (The Milky Way)



Our solar system is the tiny, insignificant part of the blue dot, which is a tiny insignificant part of our galaxy.

Our solar system makes up just 0.01% of the area of that blue dot. And the blue dot is 0.0004% of the area of the our galaxy and there are 100+ billion galaxies. So our galaxy isn’t even significant in the scheme of things.

Just to put that into perspective – If you have just $1, you are much closer to Bill Gates’ net worth ($79.1 billion) than this galaxy (Milky Way) is to the number of total galaxies. Our solar system is pretty insignificant

So if creating life were easy enough to happen once by random chance then it’s probable enough to happen many times. Because the universe is so fucking big it's unreal

More importantly what would life on other planets look and be like ?

I would not expect humanoid development to be a universal rule of any sort. Life on earth takes on many forms. We have life that’s totally underwater, that flies, that is intelligent, that isn’t, that lives on top of mountains, that lives with virtually no water.

So lifeforms on other planets may look quite a bit different.

What if the dinosaurs were never wiped out? Would one of them have developed humanlike intelligence?

Who knows Europa might be full of dinosaurs?



Or if Proxima B planet (the Earth-like planet that circles Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun.) has low gravity and an atmosphere three times denser than Earth’s, then animals as large as whales might find flying cool, according to scientists.



When you think that the universe has been around for 13.8 billion years and the earth for 4.6 billion years, and life on earth for 3.6 billion years. Then humans have only been around for 200,000 years, but it was only 10,000 years ago that agriculture (arguably the start of “modern civilization”) began.

10,000 years is nothing in comparison to the history of the world. As badass as humans think we are – It doesn’t take much of a “head start” to be way ahead of human civilisation.

If you ask me, we’re probably best off not encountering other intelligent life. The benefits are intellectual, maybe some science advancement.

But the risks if the life we find is more advanced than us?

Massive.

Just ask any civilisation on earth that encountered more advanced cultures.

Would any say that they’re the better for it?

Of course, we have little choice in the matter. It’s the more advanced cultures that tend to discover the less advanced cultures, since it’s advancement that offers the ability for exploration. If we encounter other lifeforms that are more advanced, they’ll likely found us.

Let’s just hope it goes well.