Do Scientists Believe In Aliens?

However big you think the universe is, it’s almost certainly bigger.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light-years across (one light-year is about six trillion miles).

And according to some estimates, there could be one to two billion galaxies in the universe. So perhaps it’s no wonder scientists have long wondered whether we can really be alone in that endlessness.

In fact, our intergalactic solitude seems so unlikely to some that a puzzle – the Fermi paradox – centres on its improbability. Given how statistically likely other life seems to be, it asks: where are all the aliens?

Of course, we’ve only been looking for other extraterrestrial beings since about the ’60s, and the very vastness that makes alien life so probable might also make our likelihood of meeting them next to impossible.

But a paper published in Nature Astronomy shows that most scientists agree they’re probably out there, somewhere.

This research involved four surveys, all sent out to scientists like astrobiologists (those who study life outside our planet), biologists, and physicists.

These were all about “the likely existence of basic, complex, and intelligent extraterrestrial life”. That means they wanted to know whether experts thought anything from bacteria to plants or even conscious beings were probable.

When the results came back, 86.6% of astrobiologists said they “agree” or “strongly agree” that this was likely.

While 12% were more neutral on the topic, only 2% outright disagreed.

Among non-astrobiologists, meanwhile, the response was even more strongly positive. A whopping 88.4% reckoned there probably is life out there somewhere.

“Extraterrestrial life” does not mean ET, or any other thinking, communicating being you might imagine when you hear the word “alien”. It could be as simple as a single-celled amoeba.

So it’s a good thing researchers also asked scientists how probable they thought “complex” and “intelligent” forms of life were, too.

67.4% of astrobiologists agreed this is likely, compared to 58.2% of other scientists.

Only 10.2% of astrobiologists outright disagreed that this was plausible.

These results, the study reads, “offer a snapshot of community opinion and reveal a significant degree of consensus that extraterrestrial life is likely to exist”.