The sour cream color scheme of the meteor stream made the theme team scream...

Is there life on other planets? With the notion that the Earth is just one planet attached to the Sun, a star. That the Sun is a star among a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and that there are quite possiblly a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The likelihood of life elsewhere would seem very probable. The fact that our solar system is a third of the age of the universe, means that lifeforms and species on non-earth planets, even quite possibly in our very own solar system, may have come and gone. Species have come and gone even on the Earth, just within the current 4.5 billion years, a fraction of time since the big bang of 13+ billion years ago.

NASA and SETI are constantly searching for signs of life. Scientists are studying extreme environments here on Earth hoping to understand life that could posssibly exist on other planets or their moons. Water, seen as ice on extra-terrestrial surfaces could house ancient microbial life. That life too could be in the process of constant evolution to adapt with an ever changing environment and weather system.

Jupiter's moon Europa is extremely bright when viewed through a telescope, due to the icy surface. The theory is that surface is constantly fed with fresh ice due to the pull of Jupiter's gravity which constanty opens and closes fissures in the ice which brings new liquid water to the surface...so there is liquid water hidden below. Water is the great diluder of building block elements that put evolution in motion. Could there be microbial or other aquatic life under Europa's crust?

Saturn's moon Titan is covered in a thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The conclusion drawn by an atmosphere such as this, is that Titan could have hydrocarbon lakes...hydrocarbons being a staple component of life. Titan could be home to lifeforms than would even defy the wildest imagination here on Earth.

On Earth we have thousands of creatures than have evolved and adapted to the harshest environments. Aquatic life that never sees sunlight. Life that exists in small microbial scale buried under ice. Tube worms that thrive on elements in boiling water being ejected into the ocean by vents that extend into the depths of the Earth. NASA astrobiologist Dr. Richard Hoover discovered bacteria and fungi that have lived under the icy Alaskan tundra for 32,000 years. Carnobacterium pleistocenium has thrived where no other species could in subfreezing temperatures and in total darkness.

So the likelihood of eventually finding or being found by off-planet life seems probable, but still has yet to happen.

-A