Besides the “meaning of life” question, this could be one of mankind’s greatest mysteries. I would imagine every single person reading this has asked themselves this very question at least once in their lives. Are we, as inhabitants of Earth, alone in the Universe?

I’m not very religious at all (don’t @ me), but I am not against anyone following any religion. Seriously, why would anyone care what another person’s religious views are? Anyway, I suppose that anyone who is religious has a vastly different view on this subject than I do, which is fine. Honestly, you might be right and I might be waaaay fucking off on my ideas, but to each their own.

I’m certainly not a math expert, but some quick Google dot com search returns some interesting numbers. Estimates vary quite a lot but most of the numbers I came across are between 200 and 400 billion stars, or suns. With estimates of 17% of those planets in the Milky Way being the right size, and at the right distance from their sun. That comes in at roughly 17 billion possible earths.

Let’s throw out half of those, since the two earth-size planets in our solar system are Venus and well Earth of course. With Venus being uninhabitable due to its surface temperature being more than 400 degrees. So that puts us at 8.5 billion possible earth-like planets. You can’t deny math, right?

I know those are some huge numbers, and I am NOT a numbers guy, so let’s round down to make it easier for me. The numbers are telling me that there are 8,000,000,000 chances for life to kick start and flourish like Earth has. I like the sound of that.

That, of course, isn’t even taking into account the possible planets rotating around the 2 to 4 billion stars in each of the estimated 100 billion other galaxies. Ok, now the math is getting too complicated for me. That’s a lot of math and I was told that there would be no math!

I’m going to side with math on this one (X-Files music). Besides, what’s actually scarier? Having galactic neighbors, or being all alone?