• Question: Are Aliens real ?

    Asked by Max to Monique, Ashley, Bernard, Carsten, MariaMagdalena on 7 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by mel_is_awesome, Hazzer, A_Mar_Wang.
    • Photo: Monique Henson

      Monique Henson answered on 7 Nov 2015:

      They might be! The universe is so big, and has so many stars and planets in it, that it’s quite likely that some of the other planets have life on them. We haven’t found any evidence for life on other planets yet, but lots of people think it might be there. This life might not be quite like aliens as we think of them. Rather than aliens being like humans, they might be a bit simpler – more like bacteria and viruses.

      There are groups of people who look for evidence of aliens. SETI – the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence agency uses telescopes to search the sky for signals from alien life. They haven’t found anything yet, but they’re still looking.

      It’s possible that if life does exist somewhere else in the universe, that it might be too far away for us to find them. The distances between stars in the universe is so large that it takes a long time to send messages between them. The closest star to us (other than the Sun) is around 4 light years away – that means it would take 4 years for us to send a message to aliens living near that star. If we do find intelligent alien life, talking to them could be very slow and very difficult!

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