i’d like to think we’re not the only species in the universe and some are more advance than us… likewise some less advanced.
I think this is almost a certainty. It’s a numbers game.
Many factors have to be Just Right for life to exist. It’s a vastly unlikely thing to happen.
But. The universe is a big place and we are exceptionally bad at comprehending really big things.
Our own galaxy has something like 200 billion stars in it, and we’re a relatively small one (our closest spiral galaxy Andromeda has about a trillion). There’s estimates of between 170bn and two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
Using conservative figures that gives us 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars and the actual figure is probably considerably higher (I’ve just googled and found an estimate from 2003 putting it at near double my figure, 70 and all those zeroes, so I was quite pleased with my back-of-an-envelope workings here when I saw that). By way of comparison that’s ten times the number of grains of sand on Earth (and ten times the number of molecules in a drop of water, seems we’re very bad at comprehending really small things too, who knew).
So if we were to say that life on a planet is a once-in-a-trillion occurrence (a figure I’ve just pulled out of my arse as an example), that means there’s 70 million stars out there with life in their solar system. We’ve gone from life on other planets being highly unlikely to the notion instead that it’s highly unlikely that there isn’t life elsewhere.
Of course, the kicker is that distance is another very big and difficult to comprehend number. Is there life on other planets, almost certainly. Will we ever see for ourselves, almost certainly not. Are there little green men in flying saucers, stop reading conspiracy theory websites Mulder.