What’s your favorite movie? Or cartoon? Or show … other than SciShow Kids of course!
Does it have things like spaceships in it, and weird creatures living on other planets?
If you’ve ever seen a movie or a show like that, it’s probably made you wonder: Could
aliens be real?
Well, one SciShow Kids viewer named Parth, wrote to us, and asked:
Can you make a video about aliens and where in the universe we might find them?
That’s an excellent question!
When people talk about “aliens,” what they mean are living things that make their
homes on a planet other than Earth.
So...do aliens exist?
Well, we don’t know for sure. But we do know that, so far, scientists haven’t found
any living thing on any other planet!
As far as we know, Earth is the only planet that has life on it.
So all of those characters you see in cartoons and movies, with green skin, or lots of
extra eyeballs, or octopus legs? They came from our imagination.
But why haven’t we found aliens walking around Mars, or even on the Moon?
Well, that has to do with the second part of Parth’s question, where else in space
might we find living things?
Earth, unlike other planets in our solar system, has three very important things that
make it possible for living things to, well, live!
The first of those things is water. Most living things that we know about can’t survive
without water. And no other planet that we know of has as much liquid water on it as Earth.
In fact, more than half of our planet’s surface is covered in water!
And speaking of things that are covering our planet...
The Earth is also surrounded by a layer of gases called the atmosphere. And one of the
gases in the atmosphere is the gas called oxygen.
Oxygen is the second very important thing that living things on Earth need, which our planet provides.
Oxygen doesn’t look or taste or smell like much of anything, but many living things on
Earth depend on it to live. It’s what we need to breathe!
And no other planet in our solar system has as much oxygen in its atmosphere as Earth.
And the third thing that Earth has that’s really, really, really important is food!
The soil on Earth can grow lots of different kinds of food for living things to eat.
Like grains and fruits and vegetables.
Nobody knows much about the soil on other planets, but without liquid water and plenty
of oxygen, we think it’d be much harder to grow food there than on our home planet.
So, those are the three very important things that Earth has that living things need to
survive: water, oxygen, and food.
And no other planets that we know of, have very much of any of those things.
Some of the planets in our solar system might have one of these three key ingredients,
but … not a lot.
For example, Mars has some water on it, though most of it's ice, and not liquid water.
And it has only a teeny, tiny amount of oxygen in its atmosphere, compared to how much Earth
has.
So, no other planet we’ve found seems to have all of these things together, which is
probably why we haven’t seen any signs of life on any of them.
BUT, we can’t say for sure that there isn’t life someplace else in the universe!
After all, people haven’t visited any other planets, just yet.
But we’re learning more about other planets every day!
In fact, we now have telescopes so strong that we can actually see planets outside
of our own solar system!
They’re too far away for us to see if they have water, or oxygen, or anything else.
But some scientists think there might be more Earth-like planets out there, just waiting
to be discovered.
Someday, we might be able to study these planets and find out for sure if life exists on any
of them.
But for now, we’ll just have to imagine what aliens in space look like!
Who knows? They could look sort of like us!
If you’d like us to scan the skies for more information about space, or anything else,
just let us know by getting help from a grown up, and leaving a comment below, or emailing
us at kids@thescishow.com.
Thanks for joining us for SciShow Kids and we'll see you again soon!