''Worlds Without End...''

 Mike Corthell, Editor

Discovered alien worlds (as of 2013)

*Astronomers believe that it is very likely every single star in our Milky Way galaxy has at least one planet.

 NASA as well as many other scientists say that at least 100 million planets in our own Milky Way galaxy may host alien life, and NASA estimates that humans will be able to find life within the next 20 years.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

NASA predicts that 100 million worlds in our own Milky Way galaxy may host alien life, and space program scientists estimate that humans will be able to find life within two decades.

“Just imagine the moment, when we find signatures of life. Imagine the moment when the world wakes up and the human race realizes that its long loneliness in time and space may be over — the possibility we’re no longer alone in the universe, exclaimed Matt Mountain, director and Webb telescope scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which plans to launch the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018.

NASA says that their own estimates are “conservative,” - planet hunters calculate that 100 million worlds within the Milky Way galaxy are able to sustain complex alien life forms. The estimate accounts for the 17 billion Earth-sized worlds scientists believe to be orbiting the galaxy’s 100 billion stars.

The NASA panel says that ground-based and space-based technology – including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Kepler Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope – will be able to determine the presence of liquid water, an essential sign of potential alien life.

NASA's announcement is old news to people who have been looking closer to Earth for signs of alien life and believe it has found us.
 
There are some committed pessimists, however. Proponents of the “Rare Earth” hypothesis also argue that the evolution of complex life requires an exceedingly large number of perfect conditions. In addition to Earth being in the habitable zone of the sun, our star must be far enough away from the galactic centre to avoid destructive radiation, our gas giants must be massive enough to sweep asteroids from Earth’s trajectory, and our unusually large moon stabilizes the axial tilt that gives us different seasons.

These are just a few prerequisites for complex life. The emergence of symbolic language, tools and intelligence could require other such “perfect conditions” as well.

*All observations that have been made, using the most powerful telescopes to date, show that the universe looks the same in all directions. The average density of galaxies is the same throughout the universe and does not change with distance or direction.This means that the universe is homogeneous or in other words like well mixed pot of Minestrone soup. Therefore, Corthell's 'Unified, Universal Soup Theory' states that as every spoonful of soup contains essentially the same mix of ingredients, so is the nature of the substance of our Universe.

- Mike Corthell