In this essay, Aditya Kumar Panda contemplates extraterrestrial life and analyses various theories shared about them over years.
As children, we often become curious about what lies in the sky and what exists in the vast space beyond Earth. Our planet is approximately 4.6 billion years old (Refferty 2024), while the universe itself is roughly 13.8 billion years old (Cooper 2023). In contrast, Homo sapiens have existed for only about 200,000 years. So much time has passed, yet we do not know how much lies ahead. Despite an ongoing search for extraterrestrial life, nothing has been confirmed.
Historically, folk beliefs have intertwined with storytelling; for instance, many cultures suggest that when a person dies, they become a star. Children are often told that their ancestors are the twinkling lights in the night sky. Such curiosity gave birth to the idea of life beyond our world. The very appearance of the universe compels us to ask a profound question that scientists have pondered for centuries without a definitive answer: does life exist beyond Earth?