There are estimated billions, maybe even trillions, of galaxies in the universe. In the Milky Way Galaxy alone, it is estimated that there are between 100 and 400 billion stars, each with its own set of planets rotating around it. That adds up to be a lot of planets — planets that just may contain extraterrestrial life we have yet to find. NASA has confirmed that there are already more than 5,000 exoplanets, planets that orbit stars outside our solar system. How are we to know that one of these planets, or one that we have still yet to confirm, do not contain life?

It is understandably difficult for people to accept that other life is out there somewhere, potentially knowing about humans and potentially not. After all, we cannot know for sure what they would look or act like, what their planet would be like or how advanced they are. We are still finding life that is new to us in the ocean, a part of the world that we have only explored a mere 5% of. When we consider that we do not even know all life on our own planet, thinking of life on other planets is incomprehensible. But the idea that our tiny, negligible planet is the only one out of the vast number of planets to contain living organisms is quite arrogant.

Astronomer Michaël Gillon said that dozens of planets that may be habitable have been found. Planets are considered habitable when they can contain life for a significant period of time. Scientists look for things like liquid water when determining habitability. We do not know if extraterrestrial life would need water though. While it is assumed that aliens would need water to survive based on the biology of organisms on Earth, it cannot be guaranteed that aliens would share this similarity. This means that there may be planets we have deemed inhospitable that could actually contain life — it would simply be life that did not require something we cannot fathom an organism not needing.

If we go back to the idea of finding organisms previously unknown about in the ocean, we realize that those organisms are already surviving in conditions humans previously thought organisms would not be able to survive in. It was originally thought that no organisms could survive at depths we now know organisms to survive at. The thought process was that the pressure would be too great or there would not be enough sunlight.

The Mariana Trench is 36,201 feet deep, almost seven miles. How can anything survive in a place with an atmospheric pressure of more than 16,000 PSI when the average home is at a mere 14.7 PSI? While there is science that could be discussed to answer that question, the important thing to note for this argument is that things can survive; the Dumbo octopus can be found in the Mariana Trench at depths of 32,152 feet. Organisms such as the Dumbo octopus have proved previous ideas on the conditions organisms can survive in wrong. What is to say we are not wrong about extraterrestrial life needing things like water that we use to decide which planets to explore more closely for life?

There is also this common idea that aliens would be more technologically advanced than humans and would make contact with us if they did exist. However, there are many flaws with this argument. First, maybe they do not want to reach out to us. Many humans can barely tolerate other humans, so why would we think that aliens would want to deal with us? Second, they may not be more advanced in technology than us, maybe to the point where they have no way of finding other life such as humans or no way of contacting this other life. The conditions they are living in may not allow them to communicate with us as so many of us expect to happen.

In terms of communication, there are numerous potential issues that could affect our discovery of aliens. For example, we have used radio telescopes to listen for signals from aliens, but they may be trying to contact us through a method other than sound that we are not looking out for. This means that we would be missing their messages. They may also be so far away that their message takes a very long time to reach us. They may have even made contact with Earth before, just not when humans existed. Perhaps they came to Earth during the Jurassic period, saw that Earth was full of dinosaurs and decided it was too scary and they wanted to leave; they may then have decided to never come back and to make no further contact, so humans would never find out about them because we did not exist.

There are countless factors to consider in the debate over the existence of alien life. Ultimately, though, it feels pretty silly to assume that the Earth is so significant that it is the only planet to contain life.