I just watched a discussion on C-Span about Mars

[calimary]

49. I'm one of those who believes that - in ALL the universe, so big, so vast, so greatly UN-explored

as of yet - I keep coming back to: "do you mean to tell me that there's NO life ANYWHERE out there? With ALL THAT out there? ALL those stars, ALL those planets, how many zeroes are we talking about, after the arbitrary number one, in describing distance, numbers of galaxies, etc. All that infinity-level stuff. You mean to tell me there's NOTHING ELSE out there - amidst ALL OF THAT? NONE? NO possibility of extraterrestrial life ANYWHERE?"

I think just the plain ol' law of averages dictates that there, indeed, IS. I find it really hard to believe or accept that in ALL OF THAT out there, including everything we don't know and haven't seen and haven't discovered and haven't tried to analyze yet - that there couldn't be SOMETHING ELSE out there that qualifies as life, and yes, INTELLIGENT life. I just can't believe there isn't. Even if we ourselves and everything on this planet are mere happenstance, a mere lucky roll of the dice, a mere fluke, one of those "happy accidents" in which the molecules just suddenly combined in a whole new and life-sparking way, I find it hard to believe that in the vastness of the universe there could NOT be something similar that happened elsewhere. How could it be that, in all the galaxies (with all those stars that are or could theoretically be similar to our sun, with planets orbiting around them or "solar systems" of their own, some inevitably occurring in that "Goldilocks zone" where the temperature is not too hot and not too cold but just right) there could not be at least one or two or a handful of others that could potentially support life as we know it. The probability is just too suggestive, seems to me. And I'm no scientist either, but I got good grades in science class and loved the whole subject to pieces! Married a guy who studies that very same stuff - rather religiously - to this very day and is an amateur scientist himself, and knows a great deal about astronomy, climatology, physics, mathematics, and probability.

Seems to me there just has to be. It doesn't make much sense that there wouldn't be.