8 Mind-Bending Unanswered Questions About The Universe

6. Will We Ever Find Aliens?

13.82 billion years, the universe came, catastrophically, into being. Roughly 13.8199999 billion years later, a consciousness winked into existence on a tiny planet on the outer arm of the a spiral galaxy and started looking up, wondering why nothing had made contact yet.

Sometimes, when you look around our planet, it seems inconceivable that there couldn't be more like it out there. However, given the sheer scale of not only space but time too, the chances of coming across any little green men suddenly appear to be vanishingly small.

Little green men aside, the estimates for the likelihood of finding any kind of life at all in the universe range from 99.999% certainty to less than 1%, and it all hinges on finding just one single, solitary bacteria somewhere other than Earth.

If we were to find that life has sparked itself into life on, say, Europa, it would immediately double the number of known inhabited planets in the universe. For life to arise once, could still be chance, but for it to arise twice on two different planets (although Europa is a moon, but whatever) drastically increases the probability that life is common as opposed to rare.

If we establish that life is common, it then becomes much more likely, perhaps even inevitable that intelligence would emerge.

All this said, even if the aliens are out there, contacting them is a whole other kettle of fish.