• Question: If there is other life in the universe, how much of it do you think would be complex?

    Asked by to Becky, Clara, Daniel, Simon, Thomas on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by , , .
    • Photo: Simon Albright

      Simon Albright answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I have absolutely no idea. I would be amazed if there wasn’t complex life but I think there will be more simple life than complex life. Simple things like bacteria can live almost anywhere, from the arctic ocean, to the driest dessert and the cooling water of nuclear reactors. But we’re much more fragile than they are and anything as complex as us is likely to have similar weaknesses.

    • Photo: Becky Martin

      Becky Martin answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Good answer about the hardy bacteria Simon! If you want to relate it to the Nuclear Zone, then Deinococcus radiodurans, is a good example of a bacteria that lives on radioactive materials, and these types of bacteria are known as extremophiles, which means they love extreme conditions!

      Astrobiologists, who are the people who research this sort of thing, use species like radiodurans to consider if bacteria could live in space.

      I’d like to think that there are at least some little single celled life-forms floating about somewhere in the universe….it is potentially infinite after all!

    • Photo: Clara Nellist

      Clara Nellist answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Almost certainly! There are billions and billions of stars in our universe. To help you imagine that, think of going to the beach, and think of how much sand there is (has to be a sandy beach for this to work!). Now think of how many beaches there are on the Earth – that’s a lot of sand, right? There are more stars in our universe than grains of sand on the Earth. So that’s a lot of stars! If only some of them have planets good enough for life and only some of those planets have life, that’s still a lot of planets with life.

      The trouble is that the universe is really old, and we’ve only been here for a very short time. It might take a long time for complex life to form on those planets and then even longer for them to work out a way to tell us that they were there. And even longer still for them to come and visit us, so I’m not sure we’ll get to speak with a complex alien any time soon. You never know, though..!

    • Photo: Thomas Elias Cocolios

      Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      That question relates to something called the Fermi paradox: if the universe is infinite, then there must life somewhere else so how come we have not made contact yet?
      The answer to that is that we can only experience a tiny portion of the infinite universe and that in that tiny spec of it, there might not be anyone else.
      Altogether, it means that there is most likely complex life somewhere else in the universe, just not somewhere we can go to or communicate with just yet.

      Now, if you mother is an alien, that is a different story!

    • Photo: Daniel Roach

      Daniel Roach answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      If we look at our own planet, we see that as life becomes more complex, it becomes less common. Bacteria is pretty simple stuff, and it’s everywhere in vast numbers. Humans are much, much rarer.

      So if the universe operates according to the same basic rules everywhere, then it would be reasonable to assume that life is probably pretty common (in whatever form it takes), but complex, intelligent life is a lot less common. But as the universe is so very big, it also seems reasonable to suppose that intelligent aliens are out there, somewhere, right now – probably asking the same questions we are! But the distances between stars and planets are so mind-bogglingly huge that it’s hard to see how, with our current understanding of how the universe operates, they could get about much.

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