Perhaps you have looked up at the sky on a clear night and seen thousands and thousands of stars. Most of these stars form their solar systems very much like ours, and you may have thought that somewhere, out there in the vast and endless universe, there is an intelligent being, just like you, asking the same question. Is there life outside of Earth?
Author: Luka Takki
This question has been one of the big questions humanity has probably always asked itself, and today with the help of modern telescopes and the over 5000 exoplanets already discovered, we can be pretty sure to say, yes. There most likely is some kind of life outside of Earth. Maybe not always multicellular, but basic life can form overall pretty easily.
Let’s now leave this question and think about something completely else, something you have never asked yourself. What if we have the same ancestors as some species billions of light years away on the other edge of the universe? Now, of course, if we had asked this question a hundred years ago, everyone would have laughed at us, but today, that is very much possible.
When the universe first formed in the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago, it was very small and very hot. The particles we know today were still forming, and it was way too hot for any life. After the universe continued expanding and cooling. Today, space is around as cold as -273 degrees Celsius, but in those years of cooling, there must have been a time when liquid water was present everywhere in the universe. Life could have formed anywhere in space, not just on planets with the right conditions.
This might have been the time when life formed, maybe just once, and was then carried by meteorites to other planets. Some of them were hostile where life couldn’t exist, but some of them were suitable for it, like our very young Earth at the time.
When the Earth formed, it was a lava planet and impossible for any life to exist or form. Most of the water we know today wasn’t present yet, at least not in the oceans. When we look back in time at the very first beings, we see that while they all only consisted of one cell, they were still very, very complex, so complex that they couldn’t possibly have had time to develop so fast, except if they came from somewhere else.
Our Earth in its early days was constantly bombarded by meteorites, and most of our water comes from our big friend Jupiter. That’s why we should look at ourselves from another perspective. Maybe we are the aliens here, and somewhere out there is our real home, where we developed.
Cover picture by: Melmak – Pixabay
Edited by: Sophie Van Den Berge, Johanna Larsson Krausová
