“One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it – in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them – that’s huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us,” says physicist, Michio Kaku, author of The Future of Humanity.
Astronomers have discovered a planet so extreme that it that makes our “twisted” sister planet, Venus –with its 900 degrees Fahrenheit heat, corrosive sulfuric clouds, and a surface atmosphere 90 times denser than Earth’s that has crushed nine Soviet probes –seem like a Disney World theme park.
“Historically, our assumption has been that the region around Jupiter is fairly empty, cleaned out by the giant planet’s gravity, but our results teach us that there is a region that is constantly being fed,” said Kathryn Volk at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in 2019 about a constant source of new objects that may help explain the surprising rate of icy body impacts with Jupiter, such as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 event in 1994 when over twenty fragments of comet that collided with Jupiter were observed by astronomers at hundreds of observatories around the world.
“Somewhere, on some other planet orbiting some very distant star, maybe in another galaxy, there could well be entities that are at least as intelligent as we are, and are interested in science. It is not impossible,” says Nobel-Prize laureate, physicist Murray Gell-Mann. “I think there probably are lots. Very likely none is close enough to interact with us, but they could be out there very easily.”
