Hello,

Thanks for bringing this up Raoul.

First though, Marcia (btw - I love your frequent posts) I would like to say the search for life beyond our planet is NOT THE question that drives many of us; rather it is the search/quest for knowledge and information. Answers to questions and mysteries surrounding the relationships between relativity and quantum mechanics, the true nature of space and time (i.e. traveling/navigating the vast distances between stars), dark energy, etc. Unlocking some of these mysteries are just as exciting to me as finding life on other worlds. Finding life on other worlds is only a part of the joy of Science and Astronomy to me....perhaps sometimes people do lose sight of this/lose perspective.

I say this about life in part becuase I believe life is plentiful in the universe, and is prevalant in most galaxies (due to the sheer number of stars/the odds in a single galaxy, let alone the universe). Raoul, your first post talks about Mars and then starts getting to the real point when you talk about Voyager 1 and 2. We (humans) are still in our infancy regarding space exploration as we have barely sent probes outside of our one single star solar system. We have literally tens/hundreds of millions of other stars, and untold number of planets/moons yet to explore in each single galaxy!

The Hubble Deep Field image from the mid 1990's is what convinced me of life beyond our planet, it is what helped me comprehend the size of galaxies/the size of the universe (which I still lose sleep over) and most importantly, this image drives my passion for Astronomy to this very day! Think about it - in a tiny speck/keyhole view of the sky (the field of view is a dime at approx. 75 feet) there are at leat 1,500 galaxies. Consider the odds for life just in this speck of the sky...life "finds a way" here, and I have no doubt it has found its way all over the universe.

Enjoy, Vince