Do Aliens Exist?

 Starting from ET starring the cute little Drew Barrymore to the movie Avatar, a lot of them talk about aliens.. You might have seen a few pages or videos even claiming to have a proof for them.. Are aliens real? Here are both scientific and fun facts about the aliens and the extra-terrestrial life.

1. Considering the size of the universe that we observe, it is absurd to say that aliens don’t and can’t exist.

     Stephen William Hawking,a British theoretical physicist says “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like”

(image source)

2. Scientists are already convinced that extraterrestrial life would have existed in various planets in our solar system. These planets include Venus, Mars and some moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

 Below is an image of microscopic rock forms in Mars showing the presence of water in the past:

(image source)

3. In 2007, a planet outside the solar system called Gliese 581 c was discovered which, similar to the earth, is located at a reasonable distance from its own star, a distance from where a planet can maintain liquid water.  This distance or region is called as habitable zone.

   In order to allow life to exist, a planet must be close enough to its galactic center which will favor the formation of heavy elements, and thus a rocky planet.

 At the same time, the planet should be far enough from the galactic center so that it won’t be affected by the high-frequency radiation that can damage life.

   This planet qualifies both these rules. A similar planet was also discovered in the same year, which was then named as Gliese 581 d.

 Below is the image of an extra-terrestrial planet finder for finding planets similar to the earth:

(image source)

4. A meteorite named ALH 84001 was found in Antartica in 1984. The meteorite was scanned under electron microscope and traces of bacterial evidence were found in it. It is believed that the meteorite should have come from Mars.

(image source)

5. In August 15, 1977 an American astronomer Jerry R. Ehman detected a strong radio signal which lasted for 72 seconds. The signal seemed to have come from outside the solar system which might have been a similar search for aliens by aliens of another extra-terrestrial planet. The signal hasn’t been redetected after that. It was named as ‘Wow signal’

6. There have been thousands of reports of people having seen unidentified flying objects (UFO) in the sky. In fact, the word ‘Ufology’ has been coined to describe the study of UFO reports .Although some of these reports remain still unexplained by the scientists, most of them have been dismissed as hoaxes or just a mistake of assuming the actual astronomical objects from earth as UFOs.

7. A list of nearly 120 UFO sightings starting from 1886 to 2010 has been published and regularly updated in Wikipedia. You can read it in the following Wikipedia link:

           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sightings_of_unidentified_flying_objects

8. The research under taken to find out the evidences for extra terrestrial life is called  as SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). An organization called SETI institute was found in 1984 which has been doing various projects on extra-terrestrial life.

9. Dr. Frank Donald Drake, The founder of SETI, has devised an equation to find the approximate number of possible extraterrestrial life in our galaxy. This equation has been named as ‘Drake’s equation’ after him.

   Frank also created the Arecibomessage, the first radio message sent to extra-terrestrials in 1974. The message contained a picture of human figure, the formula for the DNA and some data representing the chemicals essential for life.

 You can read more about the Arecibo message here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080802005337/http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Nov99/Arecibo.message.ws.html

10. The following links claims to have genuine pictures of aliens:

    http://www.alien-ufo-pictures.com/alien_pictures.html

 Note sure if the pictures are real, you have to judge it by yourself. But it is entertaining to watch the pictures and a lot of them look real.

11.  Have aliens ever visited the earth? This question has been asked by a lot of people who are curious to find out other intelligent beings. But we need to understand that even for light to travel to the stars close to the solar system, it takes millions of years. And most of the stars we see right now don’t actually exist now, as their life would have come to an end before the light from those stars reached our earth.

   So, it is impossible for aliens to visit us or for us to visit the aliens, unless there is a method to control time and space.

12. Some people believe that NASA has seen aliens and has been experimenting with them, but it is not revealed to the world. The following article talks about a former NASA astronaut who says that aliens have visited the earth several times:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2453700/Aliens-exist-but-NASA-covers-them-up-says-astronaut.html

13. The following link allows you to vote whether you think aliens are real or not:

     http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/aliens.html

  The good thing about the voting system is that, when you say ‘yes’, it shows you a few arguments to prove ‘no’ and it also gives you an option to view a counter argument. You can change your mind after reading the arguments and vote ‘no’ or click ‘yes’ again. It continues for a few screens. Till now 76% of people have voted that aliens do exist.