Anyone out there?

It's becoming common to hear that new planets have been discovered which could harbour life (even intelligent life). Trouble is, they are usually dozens or hundreds of light years away.

I have always believed that there must be a huge number of habitable planets in the universe. All it takes for a planet to have the potential for life is to be situated within a "habitable zone" in its solar system. If you take into account that there are millions and millions of solar systems with planets in them, you don't need to stretch your imagination to realize that the universe must be teeming with life.

As I said before, it is distance alone that prevents us from having a better knowledge of how much life there is in the universe. Fortunately, technology will surely advance and perhaps a revolutionary system of space travel might be discovered which would signal the beginning of an exciting new era of space exploration. Not during my time, I'm afraid.

I think it is highly probable that a wide variety of life forms and beings exists in the universe. I imagine there must be a myriad of worlds at different evolutionary stages. For instance, life could exist on a planet at a time similar to that when dinosaurs walked the earth, another planet could be at an age similar to our Middle Ages and so on... There could even be planets supporting extremely advanced intelligent life.

I hope at least some intelligent life out there has developed better than it has in our own world. We still have a long way to go before we begin to base our existence on universal values such as love, peace, and fraternity, which, probably, are already present on other planets of our vast universe.