Favorite Quotes from Life in the Universe Essays:

Every term, each student in my Astronomy 115 course (Life in the Universe) was assigned to write an essay giving his or her opinion on the following question:

This group of quotes involves logic. (The typos and misspellings are real, but they are not mine.) The material is presented here without comment; you will have to make up your own.

Essay Quotes: Logic


1. I tend to believe in things that cannot be fully explained. I think it leaves more to the imagination. Not everything needs a logical explanation.


2. We know planets exist around stars. Since we are an advanced civilization on planet orbiting a star, I think we should assume there are other civilizations in our galaxy on planets orbiting stars.


3. The universe is a big place but if there were advanced civilizations you think they would have detected our satellites or even ran into one if they are able to explore the universe.


4. If extraterrestrial life doesn't exist this close to the sun, then I believe that it won't exist anywhere beyond our solar system or into our galaxy. If another life existed it would definitely have been proven by now.


5. If extraterrestrials actually did exist, I think they would be able to tell us that they were out there somewhere. Granted it would take a lot for that to happen, but it is very possible for that to actually happen. Since we think that extraterrestrial are so brilliant, gifted, and so much more advanced then us I think that they would be able to come here and show us that they are out there.


6. The biggest reason I believe that there are other being out there is because they universe is much too big for our planet to be the only one with life.


7. By using ourselves as a comparison we know that there has to be at least one more planet like ours.


8. With all the main sequence star around there has to be least one more capable to sustaining life.


9. First, for there to be these so called creatures they would have to have lived on a planet as long as we have lived here. If that is the case then I believe that we would have already have found the creatures or they would have already found us. The technology that we have is not powerful enough to detect the outer limits of what we say could hold these creatures.


10. At the beginning of this semester, I thought that there was no way that there was intelligent life in our galaxy. If you were to ask me now, I'd say the same thing because we have found no other planets that are able to harvest intelligent life, therefore other life is impossible.


11. I believe there are intelligent technical civilizations in the universe; for the same reason I do not believe intelligent technical civilizations exist in our galaxy, the Drake Equation.


12. Here I will employ the principle of mediocrity to accept that this sun and, of course, its solar system is atypical of all other such systems within the galaxy. Therefore, I feel a great many suns exist that are like our sun.


13. The reason I believe something happened is because how could absolutely nothing happen and then have all of these stories form.


14. The number of stars in our galaxy compared to the number of stars in the universe is very small. For a number so small, it seems to me that there is no reason why there should be more than one techical civilization in our galaxy. ... The mathematical statistic that is given by the large ratio of the number of stars in the universe compared to the number of stars in the galaxy gives good reason as to why I think that we are the only civilization in the Milky Way Galaxy.


15. The fact that we are unsure exactly what we are looking for makes it very possible they are out there.


16. I do think there is a possibility of another race out in our solar system because our universe is so vast.


17. Everyone assumes that aliens are much more advanced than us so then why have they not made the same advances in their time.


18. As we talked about in our lectures, there were so many reasons that an extraterrestrial technical civilization could exist. All of those reason that I was given that they could exist, made me believe less and less that there actually is one out there. Everything is just way too skeptical if you ask me.


19. We know that we can travel 300,000km/s in space travel by the speed of light. I believe that there are extraterrestrial technical civilizations in our galaxy because Earth is 25,000 light years away from the center of the Milky Way.


20. I do believe that Extraterrestrial technical civilizations currently exist in our galaxy. ... I feel like we have well enough searched our galaxy, the Milky Way, enough to know that there is not life here.


21. With all of the details it took for us to be here communicating today it would be very very improbably for them to not have many similarities to us.