Agree – Isabella Maldonado:
It is ignorant to believe that there is no chance of life on another planet.
The history of the Earth is just plain weird, to be honest. Basically, 4.54 billion years ago, a big mass of dust and gas left over from the formation of the sun created the early phases of the Earth. Over time, by some miracle, the Earth developed into a place where intelligent life could grow and flourish.
First, let’s set the standard for what aliens are, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary an alien is a being that comes from or lives in another world: extraterrestrial. They’re any other living being that has not originated from Earth is an alien in this context.
There are an estimated over 700 quintillion planets in our universe. How can someone truly believe our planet is the only one of 700 quintillion to have humans or something akin to us? The odds don’t match up. Kaylie Peters, a CHS senior and a believer in aliens believes that there is too much about our Earth that we don’t know to make assumptions about the rest of the universe.
“There’s so much that we don’t even know about our own world, we’ve only explored about 5% of our oceans,” Peters said. “So who knows what’s in there? It’s very possible that life exists outside of our world.”
There are too many claims of experiences with aliens to merely make extraterrestrial life a coincidence. For all we know, Greek Gods could have been an alien race in ancient Greece. Peters believes strongly in a famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke who said, “Magic is just science we don’t understand.”
“It’s impossible to tell if they really do exist,” Peters said. “But who knows? Maybe they stop by and are just in disguise because they know humans freak out about aliens.”
Peters thinks that one possibility is that aliens are part of a more advanced civilization than we can comprehend. They might be so far advanced that they have been here on Earth but have used their resources to avoid detection.
“They have more knowledge of the unknown than we do,” Peters said. “I kind of believe that they have more understanding of the world, that the worlds that they live in or that the universe, surrounding them and how to manipulate it.”
There have been too many occurrences of people claiming to have seen aliens throughout history for them not to exist. I believe that throughout the immense amount of planets in the universe there has to be at least one other form of intelligent life We might not find out for sure in our lifetime or even in several generations, but never say never.
I do believe that there is just something out there that we just can’t explain whether that be God, or whether that be aliens. I firmly believe that like, there is too much of a like, of an appearance, that it can’t be a coincidence they all something comes from something. Nothing comes from nothing. And so it’s just, it’s I kind of, I believe that.
Disagree – Zane Swerdlow:
There is no life beyond Earth.
Time and time again, when I voice this opinion I am met with something approaching pure disbelief. It is impossible for people to give this idea leeway, shattering the epic sci-fi perceptions that they have been eating up all their lives. To me, the idea of aliens just doesn’t sit right. For reasons both empirical and vaguely spiritual, I do not believe that any aliens worth our time are out there.
One of the major arguments that people use when arguing for the existence of aliens is the fact that the universe is infinite. Because it’s infinite, they often say that there must be some other combination of conditions out there that is just like Earth’s, or that there has to be some alternative life-sustaining environment.
This is not how the infinite nature of the universe works though. Imagine an infinite field, grass stretching out forever. This is an infinite space, yet it somehow does not necessitate the existence of some advanced civilization a million miles out.
To me, it seems sensible that the universe consists of endless expanses of rocky and gaseous nothingness. Perhaps on some warm, wet planet, there lives some thoughtless amoeba pulsating in a primordial soup. Is this really what people mean when they talk about aliens? In my experience, no. Apart from the fallacy of infinite space guaranteeing infinite outcomes, I find that thinking of some greater, possibly conscious alien life conflicts with my view of the world itself.
When I observe the world around me, the precise beauty in all things strongly suggests something divine operating behind the scenes. Human consciousness, the thing that appears to separate us from all other life, is so unexplainable that science has yet to even come close. We have no evolutionary explanation, no framework derived from scientific methods. If humanity is already unique to Earth, and Earth is unique to the solar system, and our solar system is unique to the galaxy, the development of other life seems incomprehensible.
Even if this unicorn race of beings did exist, surely we would have seen them by now or at least caught their signals in our probing satellite dishes. The Golden Record, NASA’s cryptic capsule of humanity that blasted into space on Voyager in 1977 is symbolically beautiful, but to me, it serves no purpose as an instructional guide for extraterrestrial civilization. Flying into the stars, the golden record glows in the darkness of space with the touch of the loneliest thing in the universe: life.
