It's not that small of a world after all, maybe.

Yep, very probably there are life in other planets. Not possible to know if microscopic life or more complex organism. The distance between systems is enough for make impossible the knowlegde of life, as the info would take at least thousands of years in get back to Earth. But would be nice to see things like that: Alien Planet "Full Documentary" - YouTube
 
Unfortunately we have a very small sample of Earth-like planets that we can study in detail: to be exact, we have only one example. Therefore we can't tell how special we are. Even if there are 10 billion planets in the Milky Way (and there are also billions of similar galaxies in the Universe), we still don't know much until we can find a way to estimate the chance of life evolving on a planet at all and the chance that simple life forms can evolve to match the complexity of life on Earth. These odds are obviously greater than zero, otherwise I couldn't write this and you couldn't read it: but that's all we can say for certain.

Alan
 
gentle lemur said:
Unfortunately we have a very small sample of Earth-like planets that we can study in detail: to be exact, we have only one example. Therefore we can't tell how special we are. Even if there are 10 billion planets in the Milky Way (and there are also billions of similar galaxies in the Universe), we still don't know much until we can find a way to estimate the chance of life evolving on a planet at all and the chance that simple life forms can evolve to match the complexity of life on Earth. These odds are obviously greater than zero, otherwise I couldn't write this and you couldn't read it: but that's all we can say for certain.

Alan
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You make an excellent point, gentle lemur. We aren't doing a good job of taking care of our small sample that we know exists. It would be a good idea to do so, because it could be a really long time, if ever, before we find another one.
 
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