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 centers on our Milky Way Galaxy. (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: Galaxy


1. There are 200-400 billion stars in the Galaxy and the likelihood that only one of them formed life seems unlikely to me.


2. There are many things that have persuaded my decision in the fact that aliens exist in our galaxy. ... The first thing that leads me to believe that there is intelligent life in our galaxy is that our galaxy is too large to know if there is life out there.


3. But than when you think of the size of the milky way some hundred thousand light years in diameter, and how little we have explored and how much we have to learn about it seems that their might be life out their. Than when you take the principal of mediocrity, which seems logical it becomes even more feasible to think that there are other technical cavitations in our galaxy.


4. The number of stars in our galaxy has been predicted to have 100 billion to 400 billion stars in it.


5. The reason it is impossible to get an exact number of stars in our galaxy is because our galaxy is ever expanding.


6. The Milky Way is forty billion light years long, and we haven't been contacted by anyone or anything from anywhere.


7. Our galaxy is made up of billions of stars, their planetary systems, and nebula clusters.


8. Due to the size of the Milky Way galaxy it can be seen that the amount of space available provides the possibility that humans are alone in the galaxy.


9. Even with billions of stars in our solar system, I find it highly unlikely that there is another intelligent, technological civilization in our galaxy.


10. Extraterrestrial life could not exist unless water was present in their environment and it seems to me that there isn't a lot of water present in our Galaxy other than on planet Earth.


11. Our galaxy is very old, even older then the earth. If it takes our civilization this long to become as advanced as we are, why can't a different civilization be made also? Scientists have not researched every part our galaxy, so that leaves the possibility that they have missed something. I can judge that scientists have missed some major part in finding extraterrestrial intelligence. Scientists do not have all the technology needed to see all there is to be seen in our galaxy. So until they can search out the entire galaxy I do believe they are out there.


12. It still is hard to provide all the information needed to confirm extraterrestrial technical civilizations in our galaxy until the day comes when we know all there is to know about the Milky Way.


13. The galaxy is too big to know what exists out their. That is my greatest thing for thinking that there is a technical civilization out there in our galaxy.


14. The Milky Way contains about 200 billion stars with an estimated diameter of 80,000 light years.


15. Because the Milky Way is so big containing a lot of stars, there is much of the galaxy still left to search containing these beings we long to find.


16. Estimating 2.6 technical civilizations in the Galaxy is very probable considering that the Milky Way is 80,000 light years in diameter.


17. The Milky Way Galaxy consists of approximately 200 billion stars, each containing the possibility of owning planets.