Are we alone?

Welcome WASP-117b! NASA has announced confirmation of the detection of another exoplanet bringing the number to 1,743 planets and 452 multi-planetary systems (such as our Solar system). This always bears the question: With all of these planets orbiting other stars, are we alone? My answer has always been a quote from the brilliant Carl Sagan, "If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space".

Way back when humans enjoyed the stars without knowledge or understanding of how truly vast the universe is, this question never occurred to them. It wasn't until the 1920s that astronomers began to understand how big our Milky Way Galaxy was let alone the distance to our nearest galaxy and the hundreds of billions of galaxies spanning the ~14 billion light years of the observable universe.

As observations of the universe continued the question started to emerge, are there non-terrestrial life forms out there. Science fiction writers (who often turn out to be prophetic) tell us there are many. In 1961, Frank Drake wrote out a formula to determine the statistical likelihood for the existence of intelligent life other than on Earth. There are many debates about the validity of the measurements and assumptions for the values of the Drake equation. However, even with the most conservative estimates for all the values, I think it is conclusively NON-ZERO. If it's not zero then there is always the chance. With the discovery of more and more exoplanets, the chance that some of those planets harboring some form of life is not zero. The chance that some harbor life we would recognize is not zero. The chance that some harbor intelligent life we could interact with is not zero.

So, are we alone...I highly doubt it. Will we ever meet our neighbors? Only time will tell. But, with continuation of NASA's space exploration program we might knock on their door before they knock on ours.

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This is a personal blog. The views expressed herein may not represent those of my employer.