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Justin Markwat

Professor Suzanne Thomas


UWRT 1102
April 4, 2016
Thesis Draft

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like
our Earth.
-Christopher Wren
Space exploration has seen astronomical growth in the past five centuries. It
seems not long ago that we sent the first men to the moon in 1969, and now here
we are not even four centuries later in a time where the ability to send people to
space is outdated. We have robotic machines exploring foreign worlds and moons,
space telescopes that are able to capture pictures of galaxies almost fourteen billion
light years away, and giant orbital space stations that can support human life for
months at a time. We have accomplished far more than was ever thought possible
back in the 60s during the space race, and yet there is still so much to discover and
so many questions left unanswered. The most popular of these questions has to be
Are we alone in the universe? The debate over the potential of alien life has
managed to divide scientists and professionals. It has made its way into mainstream
culture and is the inspiration behind countless books, movies, and shows. However,

as much as it is researched and studied, we still have no answer; we continue to


wonder, are we truly alone in the universe?
While the question might sound simple enough, there are many factors that
have prevented us from being able to give an exact answer. The first option is to
claim there is no other life but us, but to make this statement we have to have first
searched the entire universe. This leads to a problem due to the size of the
universe. Because of the sheer size of the universe (we can see 14 billion light years
away and not even come close to seeing a fraction of it) it is currently impossible for
us to explore but a tiny fraction of what we know, which is an even tinier fraction of
what actually exists. Since that is highly improbable, we are left with only one other
option, the one I will be developing on: trying to prove that life does exist outside of
Earth. To the uneducated, this is simply a task of finding earth-like planets (one
which has a similar atmosphere, has rocky terrain and bodies of water, and lies
within the habitable zone) and searching them until life is found. However, it is
much more complicated than that. There are hundreds of variables that make this
task quite difficult. What if alien life is so different that it has different requirements
for survival, and thus we are looking in the wrong places? Or even if we do find it,
what if were not able to recognize it? Due to the nature of the question in that what
were looking for is something completely unknown to us, it seems that it would
take sheer luck to even stumble upon actual evidence of other life.

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