Does the Evidence Suggest we’re Alone in the Universe?
There’s currently no evidence that we aren’t alone in the Universe… but the numbers certainly suggest that we have neighbours out there somewhere.
We know of nothing unique on Earth which means that life would only pop up here, and we have found what look like bacterial fossils inside meteors which were blasted off of our 2nd closest neighbour, Mars & landed on Earth millions of years ago. So right there there’s a possibility that life is not unique to Earth even in our own solar system! But the real mind-boggling numbers, are when you consider just how many star systems there are out there.
In our own Milky Way galaxy, there are some 300,000,000,000 star systems like our solar system, and an estimated 40 billion rocky planets like ours, within the “goldilocks zone” around their star (close enough that water could exist as a liquid on the surface, without being so close as to boil away into the atmosphere (if the atmospheric pressure is reasonable)).
There are 500 billion galaxies roughly the size of ours, with a few hundred billion to a trillion or more stars in them, and around 7 trillion more dwarf galaxies, with a mere 1–5 billion star systems in each of them.
And this is all just in the observable Universe. The entire universe, is likely somewhere around 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than the observable universe, however some estimates have it as much as 10¹²²⁰⁰ (a 1 with 12,200 zeroes behind it) times larger!
Even if we took the lowest estimate, that the universe is about 250 x larger than the observable universe, that’s 67.5 septillion star systems, or, just a little under 10 million star systems like our sun and all of our planets, asteroids, comets, moons and gasses, for every grain of sand on Earth.
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