• Question: do you belive in aliens

    Asked by grozmanas to Lauren, Joseph, Eoin on 12 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by seanmcdonald, jbag12345678, bubblybear321.
    • Photo: Lauren Mc Keown

      Lauren Mc Keown answered on 12 Nov 2013:


      I don’t believe in the “little green man” aliens that you see on the TV shows, and I don’t believe that if intelligent life on some other planet out there were to make contact with us, that it would be in a violent or attacking way, like you see on TV. But I do think aliens exist and I would love to meet one. In fact, it would be my greatest wish.

      Unfortunately I have to be a bit skeptical and think that at least microbial “aliens” exist on either other Solar system objects or exoplanetary objects. There is speculation that maybe extremophiles (microorganisms or “germs”) that can live in extreme conditions (such as really hot/really cold/thin atmosphere) may live on some of the moons in our Solar system. NASA’s Kepler mission has also detected billions of extra – solar planets outside our own big Solar system, some which are the size of Earth..so I think that statistically and given that the host stars are sometimes similar to the Sun, unless none of these planets contain water or a suitable atmosphere, there is no apparent reason why life would not be possible on them. Do you believe in aliens?

    • Photo: Joseph Roche

      Joseph Roche answered on 20 Nov 2013:


      I would like to think that there is some other form of life out there. It might be a very boring bacteria or something. Well, when I say boring, it would still be arguably the greatest discovery of all time if we were to find it 🙂

    • Photo: Eoin O Colgain

      Eoin O Colgain answered on 21 Nov 2013:


      If they did not exist, then something very, very special has happened on Earth. We should try to understand how one turns a non-living chemical soup into a living cell. The origin of life, like the origin of the universe, is one of the greatest problems in science.

      Darwin can tell us how life evolves, but when confronted with the problem of how life got started, he famously quipped “One might as well speculate about the origin of matter”. Most scientists are positive about aliens though.

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