• Question: wich of the planets in our solar system is most likely to hold life

    Asked by homicidalseb to Aggelos, Andrew, Eileen, Naomi, Shane on 13 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Andrew Jackson

      Andrew Jackson answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      Mars i reckon, and is where humankind are looking hard for evidence of life. They are looking for evidence of water trapped in the soil or rocks of Mars which would indicate the possibility of life. Then the scientists will look for evidence of living organisms by looking for chemicals that only living things can produce. Ultimately, we would love to find some fossil evidence of living organisms there – but its likely that if there is or was life on Mars that it might only be things like bacteria or other microbes – that would still be a massive discovery though.

      -andrew

    • Photo: Shane Bergin

      Shane Bergin answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      I think Mars might have had life on it at some point in its past. there is evidence of water on mars and that is a nescessary ingredient for life. I think if we find evidence it will be microbial at best.. not aliens like you’d see on the TV. Mars has a very thin atmosphere that is made mainly of carbon dioxide (the stuff we are working hard to reduce in our atmosphere) which is not very friendly to life.. but who knows! Life exists at the bottom of the oceans (very unfriendly place) so maybe, just maybe there’s life on mars.. wouldn’t that be a cool thing to discover!

    • Photo: Aggelos Zacharopoulos

      Aggelos Zacharopoulos answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      @homicidalseb
      most of the space scientists hold high hopes for Mars to have some sort of life on it. But they dont expect to be similar to humans in any way shape or form. The probability of finding alien life increases dramatically once you look outside our solar system, into our galaxy and beyond.

    • Photo: Eileen Diskin

      Eileen Diskin answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      EARTH! Haha. Other than our own lovely planet, probably Mars, like the others are saying. I think its really cool to think about what life on other planets might be like – probably it looks totally different to here, like nothing we can imagine!

      Also, I do think its pretty likely that there is life on another planet, in another solar system somewhere out there in the universe. There’s something called the Drake Equation, which is an equation that tries to predict how possible it is that there is intelligent life in the Milky Way (it takes into account things like, the number of stars, the number of stars that have planets, the number of planets that could support life…things like that). Most of the factors are unknown…but its cool to think about!

    • Photo: Naomi Elster

      Naomi Elster answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      I think it’s quite likely that if there was life on another planet it would be so different from life as we know it we probably wouldn’t recognise it. For a long time scientists thought that the “habitable zone” or area where life is possible was confined to Venus, Earth and Mars – Mercury, being so close to the sun, is a fireball, and anything further out than Mars is too cold to have liquid water. Venus is a very hostile planet – the atmosphere is full of poisonous gases, for a start – and we’ve looked for life on Mars for a very long time without finding it.

      Recently though, some interesting pictures came back that suggested one of Saturn’s moons, Europa, might have liquid water underneath its icy surface. Even more exciting is that water has actually been seen on one of Jupiter’s moons, Enceladus. this is because the objects around these moons are large enough to create a string force of gravity that warms the interior of the moons enough for liquid water to exist. So I think that maybe the search for life in the solar system should expand to look at these moons.

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