I feel like there has to be alien life out there, right?

Do you know how big the universe is?

The Saturnian moon of Titan is “the only known object in space other than Earth on which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found.” Titan is located about 750 million miles from Earth. In cosmic terms this is almost literally nothing; 750 million miles is 0.0125% of a light-year, and there are 93 billion light-years in the observable universe alone, to say nothing of the actual entire universe, which may be infinite but which is pretty guaranteed to be vastly larger than the observable portion. So we have to travel an incomprehensibly infinitesimal distance away from Earth to find “stable bodies of surface liquid.” How likely do you think it is that liquid water, particularly liquid water capable of sustaining life, can be found elsewhere in the universe beyond just Earth and some crummy scrub moon orbiting Saturn? Do you think it’s highly unlikely? Do you think the Solar System is just the most fantastically coincidental place that it ended up with the only two liquid-water bodies within the uncountable nonillions of miles in the universe? You think this hasn’t happened anywhere else?

Titan’s water is heavily laced with ammonia so I wouldn’t go looking for any prokaryotes there. But the sheer probability that some other planet somewhere has more favorable conditions for life seems, honestly, quite obvious. If you’re really skeptical I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a big universe with a lot of stars. It seems like every time we look at one of those stairs in detail we see a bunch of planets surrounding it. The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, has at least one planet orbiting its “habitable zone,” where conditions for life are most favorable. So a planet in our celestial backyard has surface liquid and a star in our celestial neighborhood has a planet that may very well enjoy similar biospheric conditions as Earth. And we’ve really only just begun the slow and laborious process of looking at any of these objects in any detail. Imagine if you looked through some tall grass and you immediately found $5, then you looked through another patch eight feet away and immediately found $20. It would be more than reasonable to think there’s probably more money nearby—maybe lots more money, maybe even something more valuable. Maybe you’d be wrong but you’d probably be right.

It just seems pretty much guaranteed that there is alien life out there. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know if it’s intelligent or even sentient. Maybe it’s just a blob of something organic. Maybe it’s a single cell. Chuck Schumer this month proposed to write “non-human intelligence” into the congressional record, so apparently he and a few other Democrats think that there’s the distinct possibility of thinking, breathing alien life out there somewhere, maybe even here. I doubt it’s here but I don’t doubt that it may very well be somewhere. Even if you can’t find a sentient being somewhere in all that empty space, how hard could it possibly be to find, you know, an alga somewhere, in some distant world-ocean or underneath a rock in a binary star system?

Then again the idea of another sentient species out there doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. All life that we know of seems to proceed on a pretty linear and predictable pattern, from the simple to the complex, from the unthinking to the deeply thoughtful. Yes, evolution might follow highly different variances depending on initial conditions. But it just doesn’t strike me as crazy to imagine that, somewhere, something’s happened that’s mostly similar to what happened here. And it doesn’t even seem that crazy to imagine that there might be alien beings out there whose technological civilization is radically more advanced than ours. It took us only 100 years to go from a largely illiterate agrarian society to a spacefaring species with distinctly realistic ambitions at interplanetary colonization. What do you think it would look like if a similarly disposed species had, I don’t know, just a 200-year head start on us? What about 1,000 years, or 2,000?

Among the myriad skeptical replies to these good odds, perhaps the oddest I’ve heard have come from Christians who suggest that the presence of alien life would complicate the tenets of Christianity itself: God through the death and resurrection of His Son saved humanity from damnation, but what about sentient extraterrestrials from the planet Vega Minor? Are they damned? Do they have their own Savior? Well, I don’t know about that one way or the other, but I just don’t see how that negates the possibilities here. As a devout Catholic I would treat the relationship between God and aliens the same way I do that between God and Methodists: That’s between Him and them. But do we really imagine that God is beyond saving multiple intelligent species? Like what, we’re going to call Him on this rule? “That’s not how it works, God!” Go ahead and try it and see what happens and report back here, please.

Alien life is virtually certain to exist somewhere. I don’t suppose there’s a whole lot we can do with this information. The only chance that it might affect us in any meaningful way is if the alien life in question is (a) intelligent, and (b) advanced enough to be spacefaring over galactic-level distances. The former doesn’t seem terribly far-fetched and the latter is only dependent upon what I would imagine is a relatively attainable set of variables. In either case it’s pretty interesting to think: We’re pretty much guaranteed to not be alone in the universe. Don’t be grumpily doubtful about it. Admit it: You want to believe.