Robitzski reports numerous geoscientists now conclude that the millions of know galaxies are filled with billions of stars, many of which have roughly Earth-sized exoplanets within their "Goldilocks" zones. Also, billions of planetary moons, comets, and planets have stores of water, organic molecules, and amino acids like those that make up life on Earth. Cathal O’Donnell, a 3D bioprinting researcher at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, likes those odds — he argues in The Conversation that the abundance of potentially habitable worlds out there makes the discovery of extraterrestrial life “inevitable and possibly imminent.”
One In 40 Billion Stars
O’Donnell argues that the sheer vastness of space and quantity of exoplanets orbiting in habitable zones — the sweet spots "Goldilocks" zones) where they’re not too close nor too far from their star — makes the discovery of extraterrestrial life overwhelmingly likely, citing research that calculated that billions of such planets may exist. And just because a planet doesn’t have a temperate climate doesn’t mean life couldn’t exist there — O’Donnell argues that terrestrial life can be found in Antarctica, in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and other seemingly inhospitable settings.
Numbers Game
The fact remains that we’ve only encountered life in one place: Earth. But O’Donnell predicts that we’ll be able to probe for life in the near future. “The ancient question ‘Are we alone?’ has graduated from being a philosophical musing to a testable hypothesis,” O’Donnell writes. “We should be prepared for an answer.” NASA's Bridenstine, a Trump appointee, isn’t the only NASA administrator that believes in the existence of extraterrestrial life. Earlier this month, Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission directorate, said he thought it was likely that life exists beyond Earth. As for where we might find it, NASA isn’t pinning all of its hopes on Mars. The agency is considering missions to two other potentially life-supporting bodies: Saturn’s moon Titan and Jupiter’s moon Europa.
The Observer published an interview with Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut. In it, she details everything from her childhood to her experience in space — as well as her firm belief that Earth isn’t the only source of life in the universe. “Aliens exist,” the astronaut insisted, “there’s no two ways about it.”
Basing Conclusions on a Scientific Education and on the Numbers Game
Sharman doesn’t claim to have seen any extraterrestrial life during her jaunts to space. Like many others, her scientific studies lead her to conclude that the universe is just too massive for Earth to reasonably be the only place where life exists, [albeit from one-celled animals to very advanced extraterrestrials well beyond that of Humans on Earth today.]
Also see more of Robitzski's reporting: https://futurism.com/life-universe-scientist-drake-equation-study
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
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