Jeff Hoffman hovered in the void of space, looked at our planet from above, with one glance scanned huge vortices and large cities.
In five flights - including the first one to the Hubble Telescope - Hoffman spent 1,211 hours of his life in space.
“I believe there is life somewhere else in the universe,” he said in an interview.
Of the 108 billion people that have ever existed on our planet, less than 600 have seen it from orbit. This rare experience, along with high scientific degrees, makes astronauts well qualified to answer the question: "Are we alone in the universe?"
And how will people who have seen our planet from the outside answer this question?
"It is not that simple".
The reason alien life most likely exists is the same reason that it is very difficult to find - the universe is huge. Unimaginably huge.
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“It has long been proven that every star has planets,” says Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. "Now let's count."
And it's not so easy to count. How many stars are there in the universe? It depends on its size. Scientists observe the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation, which formed about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, and based on this, they argue that the age of the observable universe is about 14 billion years. But maybe one day something will be discovered that will change our ideas about the age of the universe. There is also a possibility that there are other universes, combined with ours into one multiverse.
According to astronomer David Kornreich, there can be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or septillion) stars in the observable universe. (True, he later noticed that this number could be greatly underestimated).
And if every star has at least one planet, then the existence of life somewhere else seems quite likely.
But still…
“We need proof to know for sure,” says May Jameson, the first African American woman in space.
Yes, they are. Evidence.
Hoffman believes there is life out there somewhere.
“But as a scientist, I have to look for confirmation of this,” he says, “but so far there is none. So I have nothing to support my faith with. But I still believe in it."
And that's the whole problem. With so many planets - say, a septillion or so - it seems clear that life cannot exist on just one. But science cannot yet prove it. The land may well be unique.
It may be that there is something special in our part of the Milky Way, in our solar system or on our planet, which makes life possible only here and nowhere else, no matter how unlikely.
The Kepler Telescope has discovered 2,342 "confirmed" exoplanets, 30 of which are "roughly equal in mass to the Earth and are in the habitable zone." This is not even a drop in the ocean. This is a piece of an atomic nucleus in an unimaginable ocean.
If we find one fossil on Mars … then the universe is full of life
Unfortunately, now we can only see a small piece of the vast sky, and therefore the chances of finding extraterrestrial life are very small. But, fortunately, they are still there, and for this you do not need to catch radio signals from Proxima Centauri. Maybe we'll find her much closer to home.
“If we find even one fossil on Mars, or some of the most primitive bacteria on Europa or Enceladus, then we will understand that the universe is full of life,” says Chris Hadfield.
We constantly find life in places where, it would seem, it cannot exist. Astrobiologist Felipe Gomez discovered bacteria in the acid lake that live on heavy metals and do not need oxygen.
So it is entirely possible that life could exist under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa or on Saturn's Enceladus. As Dr. Ian Malcolm said, "Life will find a way."
However, don't rush to print welcome posters for the aliens. We speak of life as "a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution." This does not mean spaceships and lasers at all.
Most likely, Hadfield concludes, "life is relatively common," but "complex, intelligent life is rare."
So a lot of time will pass before meeting with other civilizations. But, as the great Stephen Hawking once remarked, maybe this is for the best.
Ilya Kislov