Extraterrestrial life forms, real or made up stories?

Richard Dragicevich, Staff Writer|April 13, 2022

Alien coming back to the spaceship, or UFO.

Alien coming back to the spaceship, or UFO.

Many people believe there are aliens out there. Strange sightings of UFOs. Strange signals received through radio systems. Unreleased, and hidden releases by NASA and the US government. Gathering all the evidence, it is a pretty good claim, that there is another life form. But, is it all true, or is it edited film and stories?

Opinions of experts

Chynthia Wijaya is a reporter for theconversation.com. When asked Jonti Horner has this to say about the topic. “Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to have up to 400 billion stars. If each of those has five planets, we’d have two trillion planets in our galaxy alone. And we know there are more galaxies in the cosmos than there are planets in the Milky Way.” Jonti Horner is an astrobiologist and astronomer at the University of Southern Queensland. He is claiming that, our galaxy contains many planets. Thus, creating a high probability of harboring life on a few of those planets.
 
But, there are astronomers out there that believe that this is in fact not correct. One of these astronomers is Martin Van-Kranendonk. Martin is the director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology. He was also involved with NASA on their Mars2020 mission to search for life forms on Mars. Asked about his opinion on extraterrestrial life. He responds with; “…there is no agreed-on definition of carbon-based life even here on Earth.” What he is trying to say is that we don’t even know what our definition of a life form is here on Earth. So we cannot assume that other planets have the same or similar carbon based life as we do

Estimation of our solar system

Frank Drake, is an astrophysicist. He dives deeper into the probability of other life in the solar system. He argues, “Start with the number of stars in our galaxy, which is conservatively estimated at 100 billion, though is often cited as three times that. Of those 100 billion, from 20% to 50% probably harbor planetary systems—an estimate that becomes more and more reliable as the Kepler Space Telescope and various ground-based observatories detect increasing numbers of exoplanets.” Drake is arguing that we have an increasing ability to look further into the galaxy. This allows us to become more informed about the probability of a planet harboring life. He predicts 20% to 50% have that ability and may have aliens living there.
 
In spite of that, Martin Van-Kranendonk has shut this probability detail down as well. He disagrees with this statement. Martin argues, “…we have not investigated every corner of the universe for signs of life and we do not even know what may constitute life in another chemical system.” Saying that we don’t know what other life forms look like in another chemical system is a major setback. The 20% to 50% estimate may be much much smaller because of this theory.

UFO sightings

Next, the most interesting factor of aliens, UFO’s or Unidentified Flying Objects. There have been many leaked videos of UFOs entering and leaving our solar system. These objects do not look like what any nation around the world manufactures for planes. Making these sighting’s even weirder. Richard Dragicevich, a student from Jenison High School, says this about UFO’s. “The US government may be reporting on the UFO’s entering and exiting of our atmosphere, but wont be releasing it to the public. Releasing to the public may cause mass kaos and distress within the community, which may be a factor in why they hide this information from us.”
 
But, many people think the opposite. These people deny that there is other life forms out there and believe it is us in the solar system. One of the believers is Grant Ginzer, a high school student from Jenison High School. He says that, “UFOs are experimental technology from rivals overseas”

On Jupiter’s moon?

Based on the facts provided above, it is obvious that aliens actually do exist out there. But where could they be living? Are they hiding from us, or can we not see them yet? In recent years, the exploration of new planets has gotten easier. Helen Maynard-Casely, an instrument scientist for the WOMBAT, agrees that aliens do exist. “This is because we’re increasingly finding various potential pockets in our solar system that may be hospitable to life as we know it. For instance, consider the under-ice oceans of Europa and Ganymede (two of Jupiter’s large moons): these are places where the temperature is just right, there is access to water and to minerals, too.”
 
But, also according to Helan, “that’s viewing things with a very Earth-like lens, and of course alien life could be very different to our own.” Helan agrees with Martin. But she still believes that there is something out there that may or may not be the same life form as us here on Earth.
 
As you can see, there is lots of information for both sides of this argument. Our solar system is large, and we haven’t explored a tiny fraction of it. Believing that there is no alien life out in the universe is complete nonsense. Still one could make the argument of no other life forms existing. What do you think, do aliens exist, or is it a bunch of edited film and old stories?