Roberto Cruz Monroig: Life in other planets

Since my childhood, I always wondered if there’s any type of life outside our planet. Several films and documentaries through the years suggest the existence of extraterrestrial life, but there is no evidence in our real world to support it. Everything suggests that we are alone in the universe. Why would Earth be the only planet in the entire universe with life? Why we would be alone in such a big universe? What makes us special? Maybe the form of life we are expecting to find is not which in reality exists.

Through the years, I have watched how scientists, with the employment of tools like the telescopes Hubble, Kepler and others, have been discovering new planets with possible conditions to support life on it. Many of them may have things in common with Earth; for example water in its surface, a star in their solar system, or even an atmosphere. Unfortunately, they are light years away from us, making it impossible to determine such conditions or whether life exists or not. But a little more closer to the Earth, Jupiter’s fourth largest moon Europa have many of these conditions. Scientists have discovered that Europa is covered by a thin layer of ice, which covers oceans that can reach the 50 kilometers of depth. Such information led scientists to believe on the existence of a type of organisms that can interact with water. Another system being investigated is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Titan has an atmosphere mainly composed by nitrogen and methane. It has a higher pressure than Earth on its surface and a colder temperature. The reasons of study given by scientists are organic molecules compounded by ammonia and methane mixture, which also includes hydrogen cyanide, a compound of synthesis of amino acids. The only thing that makes improbable the presence of organisms is the low temperatures on its surface. 

Another place that we possibly find life is on galaxies with same conditions of star formation as the Milky Way. Galaxies with low-rate of star formations are less probable to find any type of life. Andromeda, one of the nearest galaxies from the Milky Way, has a similar rate of star formation, so it is a candidate to find a form of life. But finding life on another galaxy, in this case Andromeda, is a big challenge because of the distance from the Milky Way; about 2.54 ± 0.11 megalight-years. This is an extremely long distance to travel for any type of machine that we have with today’s technology.   

I hope that the future improvements to our actual technology for space explorations focuses on determine specific conditions to support life or even life itself. Also, the reach capacity of a future instrument will play an important role with explorations of far away planets or galaxies. It would be very interesting to discover a form of life outside of Earth; for example bacterias, a species of intelligent life, a human-like form of life or a new type of life never studied before. A discovery of this magnitude would revolutionize the entire world of science.