with all the possibilities of life popping up in our own solar system (europa being my fave), it is almost stupid to think there is no life out there in the trillionss of billions of star systems.
lets see: typical estimates are "hundreds of billions of galaxies" in the universe. lets just say 100 billion. the milky way has 100 billion stars. taking this as an average galaxy, thats 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10^23) stars in the universe. the chance a star would have planets orbitting it that could support life is about 2% (look it up), and thats only using what our idea of life currently is. 2% of... that number is 2*10^21 stars that could have a planet capable of supporting life.
the annoying thing is that all these stars are so damn far away that unless someone finds a way to create/harvest and manipulate wormholes within my lifetime, ill never get to see any aliens =( kip thorne believes that the laws of nature keep time machines from existing (and has a lengthy explanation of it in his book "black holes and time warps"). this part is my own personal thinking and i'm no Hawking, but if a worm hole exists it will be a time machine no matter what, even if it only scales time for times as small as 10^-42 of a second (cant remember the name of that critical value). without going into too much detail i believe thats because even the smallest movement of one of the mouths out of sync with the other mouth will cause an extremely minute time phase, just like all movement in the universe. its just so small in typical life that it couldnt possibly affect us. so yeah, so much for seeing aliens...
any other ways to travel across the universe in a human life time?