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All That Is
The Mathematical Probability That We Aren’t Alone
The image above may look like the night sky filled with stars, but in fact each spot of light you see is an entire galaxy.
Pause for a moment and really drink that in. Each source of light you see is a galaxy, filled with stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, nebulae, quazars, pulsars, black holes, dark matter, and, possibly, some form of life.
How Many Stars Are Out There?
The Milky Way has about 100 billion stars. Using the Milky Way as our model, we can multiply the number of stars in a typical galaxy (100 billion) by the number of galaxies in the universe (2 trillion).
There are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. Or, to put it another way, 200 sextillion.
That’s 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000! — Brian Jackson, Associate Professor of Astronomy, Boise State University
I don’t know about you, but that number staggers me. It’s more than my mind can fathom. 200 sextillion stars, each one a possibility.
Is There a Mathematical Probability of Life?
“There are four hundred billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If only one out of a million of those had…
