English science fiction writer, futurist and scientist Arthur Charles Clarke once said: “There are two possibilities: either humanity is alone in the Universe, or it is not. And both of these probabilities are equally terrifying. If you think about it, the statement is pretty accurate.
On the one hand, it is really scary to imagine that our civilization huddles on the only inhabited planet in potentially endless space. On the other hand, if extraterrestrial life forms exist, one can only guess what a large-scale contact with them can turn out to be for us.
However, more and more scientists today are inclined to think that disbelief in aliens is akin to statements about the rotation of the Sun around the Earth. A new study by American astronomers suggests that the universe is replete with inhabited planets, but they are still very rare.
The Kepler satellite-telescope, launched by NASA in March 2009 and serving to search for exoplanets, recently discovered more than one thousand two hundred extrasolar worlds, where celestial bodies revolve around the same stars as our Sun. According to the assumption of experts, only in the Milky Way galaxy the number of such planets can reach hundreds of billions, while from five to twenty billion of them may turn out to be Earth-like.
Is the universe revolving around the earth?
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Astronomers Woodruff Sullivan and Adam Frank are convinced that the chances of the absence of other inhabited planets in the universe other than pasha are negligible. According to the researchers, even if one hundred billion uninhabited celestial bodies account for one with life, then the total number of inhabited planets can be many trillions.
At the same time, somewhere life may still be in its infancy and be ordinary bacteria, while somewhere there probably are civilizations similar to ours. And, finally, it is logical to assume that overdeveloped civilizations and creatures, separated from us by billions of years of evolution and representing, for example, incorporeal lumps of energy, live on certain planets.
In other words, according to simple mathematical logic, if in an immense space with a great many planets there is one on which life originated, then with a high probability it can be assumed that there are a great many such planets. Otherwise, the whole Universe revolves around the Earth …
Orthodox scientists, however, are not in a hurry to admit that aliens come to visit us on flying saucers, to say the least - they are constantly on Earth, but one thing can be said with certainty: official science has long recognized the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms and even started looking for them. The aforementioned satellite with the Kepler telescope, sent off Earth by the American National Space Agency, is the best confirmation of this, since its main goal was precisely the search for exoplanets suitable for life.