"There’s no two ways about it," she said in the interview. "There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life."
By AARON REICHBright nebula gas cloud in deep outer space(photo credit: INGIMAGE)
Is mankind alone in the universe?This is a question humanity has pondered for untold centuries if not longer. And as time went on and humanity reached for the stars, it seemed certain that life on other worlds was within our reach at long last.And yet, in the 50 years since Neil Armstrong made one giant leap for mankind on the Moon, there has yet to be a single interaction between humans and aliens in outer space.However, there have always been rumors that brushes with extraterrestrial life have happened before – though it was covered up, shrouded in conspiracy.The popular depiction of those believing in these conspiracy theories are usually tinfoil hat-wearing paranoid theorists, and has joined the ranks of popular conspiracy theories such as the JFK second shooter and the inside job on September 11, 2001. In other words, experts with firsthand experience are usually never the ones expressing such beliefs.But these theories may have gained more credibility last weekend, when one of the UK's first astronauts, Helen Sharman, said in an interview with the Observer – the Guardian's Sunday edition – that aliens do, in fact, exist."There’s no two ways about it," she said in the interview. "There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life."Will they be like you and me, made up of carbon and nitrogen? Maybe not."Sharman was one of seven British astronauts to reach outer space, and visited the Soviet Mir space station in the early 1990s. As such, unlike many other theorists, she has firsthand experience with space travel.In addition, she isn't the first such expert to hold such a belief. In 2017, former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo told CNN that evidence exists proving aliens have reached Earth before.Famous theories in UFO lore of alien encounters with the third rock from the Sun include the infamous 1947 Roswell incident, where a UFO is believed to have crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and the 1977 Wow! signal, where a strange and to this day unidentified radio signal was received by Ohio State University researchers and remains among the most credible pieces of evidence of the existence of life in outer space.As humanity roams the stars even more, the idea of aliens may not be more credible, but the possibility has not been ignored by scientists, who regularly do work in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) around the world.It has also not escaped the interest of the collective zeitgeist, as exemplified by the mass Internet phenomenon in September 2019 that was the raid on Area 51, a US military base in Nevada commonly held by many as the location home to alien life forms in US custody, along with numerous other theories.Of course, there is another possibility regarding why humanity has yet to interact with alien life forms in outer space, and it's one that Sharman summed it up almost chillingly:"It’s possible they’re here right now, and we simply can’t see them."However, life in outer space definitely does exist, just not aliens. Israel made sure of that when the failed Beresheet landing dumped thousands of microscopic tardigrades, also known as "water bears," onto the Moon,
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