Why scientists think aliens probably do exist (but not like in the movies) ...Middle East

The former US President Barack Obama created a storm over the weekend after he said that aliens are real, although, disappointingly, he hadn’t seen any.

While internet chatter about his interview with the American podcast host  Brian Tyler Cohen focused on the old conspiracy theory that alien spacecraft are stored in Area 51, a Nevada Desert air base, Obama later clarified he meant that “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there”.

Obama also joked that his first question upon taking office in 2009 was to ask “where the aliens were”, adding that he had not been presented with any evidence of their existence.

Obama is not the only person to have wondered thusly. The question of whether we are alone in the universe is a respectable branch of astrophysics.

Alien life could even be in our own solar system. We may just have to lower our expectations about how complex it is, says Dr Sarah Casewell, an exoplanet specialist at the University of Leicester. “I think a lot of us believe it would be very odd if there is not any form of other life out there,” she says.

It can be tempting to reason that aliens must exist. Life has managed to evolve on Earth, and there are lots of other planets in the universe, so it has probably evolved there, too.

But it might not be inevitable. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The time between it becoming hospitable to life and the first primordial cells appearing seems to have been somewhere between 100 and 200 million years – hardly the blink of an eye.

Intelligent life needs a brain

Astrophysicists have tried to work out roughly how likely it is that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains intelligent aliens that might try to contact us. The “Drake equation” weighs up factors like the chance of intelligent life developing as well as facts about the galaxy, such as the number of habitable planets.

Put all those variables together in the right way and you end up with N: the number of alien civilisations that could theoretically communicate with humans.

One of the most recent attempts to calculate N was by Professor Christopher Conselice, an extragalactic astronomer at the University of Manchester. He concluded the number of alien civilisations in our own galaxy – at this very minute! – is somewhere between four and 211, with the most likely number being 36.

But if there are so many civilisations out there, why haven’t we heard from any of them yet? Never mind a visit – we haven’t had so much as a postcard.

This idea has been troubling astronomers since the 1950s, when it was termed the Fermi Paradox, after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi. The silence, said Professor Conselice, might come down to one of the variables in the equation having been too optimistic: how long a civilisation lasts before it goes extinct.

Take our own. Humanity has been capable of interstellar communication for only the past 100 years. How much longer can we last before blowing ourselves up or turning the Earth into an oven?

The same goes for aliens. “If their lifetime is not very long, that would not give civilisations enough time to develop a technology in which they could reach us on Earth.”

We also have to take into account the staggeringly vast distances between the stars and that any signals, not to mention ships, cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

“If the number of civilisations is small, then the likely distance to the nearest one is quite far,” says Professor Conselice. “If the number in our galaxy is 36, the closest ones would be about 10,000 light-years away. That means it would take a signal 10,000 years to reach us.” We might be dead by then. Or they might.

If that’s disappointing, there may well be alien life, if not communicable life, much closer to home.

While no other planet in our solar system is thought capable of harbouring life, some of their icy moons might – in particular, Europa, which orbits Jupiter, and Enceladus, which orbits Saturn.

There is reason to think that both of these moons may have hydrothermal vents under their surface. These could be similar to the ones beneath the oceans of Earth, whose unique conditions may have fostered the first life here too, says Edward Turner, education manager at the UK’s National Space Centre.

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Hydrothermal vents on Earth don’t just host simple bacteria, but also some quite sophisticated lifeforms, including crabs and tubeworms. “Crabs could be considered intelligent life,” said Turner.

We should learn more about Europa from two missions to Jupiter, one from NASA and one from the European Space Agency, due to arrive around 2030.

So, any alien hunters should turn their focus to our own solar system. The truth is much more interesting than any conspiracy theory.

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