September 9, 2010 – The universe is big. And I mean really big. Just how big is beyond our normal ability of comprehension. Our Milky Way galaxy has up to 400 billion stars. The Hubble telescope is capable of detecting about 80 billion more such galaxies. Surely there are more. Each star may have a number of planets circling it.
One thing for sure is that Earth is not the center of the universe. A popular analogy gauging the number of stars in the universe is that the Earth is comparable to one grain of sand among all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth. I don’t know, there’s a lot of sand on even one beach, but both are incomparable numbers.
And not only are there a lot of stars but they are all incredibly far apart.
Just traveling across our own Milky Way galaxy would take 100,000 years, even at the speed of light.
So given the huge number of stars, it seems logical that at least some of them, probably millions, support some kind of life, some with life forms far more advanced than ours.
But we’ve been seriously looking and listening for 50 years for signs of life from the cosmos to no avail. We’ve seen tantalizing photos and video of UFOs that can’t be easily explained. Yet there has never been any concrete evidence of even the simplest of extraterrestrial life forms.
Polls indicate that a majority of people believe that there must be intelligent life forms out there presumably because of the huge number of planets that might harbor life. In spite of those numbers, public figures are often ridiculed about “little green men” if they seriously broach the subject.
