billions and billions? not even close!

I just wrote about this subject on this blog: so small and insignificant, but not really

In today's paper, there is an article called Beyond 'billions and billions' by Seth Borenstein and according to it, a new study says that the number of stars in the universe (give or take, what, tens of billions? - me) is 300 sextillion. That's a 3 followed by 23 zeros. Or, 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Another way of looking at it is illustrated by Harvard astro-physicist Charlie Conroy: the number of stars in the universe "is equal to all the cells in the humans on Earth."

How's that? Okay, there are about 6 billion people on Earth - now multiply that by the number of cells in the average human body: 50 trillion. And that equals 300 sextillion (according to the article - I didn't double-check this figure).

Which takes me back to the notion of 'little green men' and the idea of 'space aliens.' Now I've never been transported onto an alien ship, nor have I ever seen a UFO... as far as I know. But throughout time, people have been looked upon as certifiably crazy if they ever told anyone that they believed in extra-terrestrial life. Yet with 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe (is that in the 'known' or 'unknown' universe?) and even assuming that the tiniest fraction of those stars have planets that support any kind of life, wouldn't it make more sense to believe that other 'intelligent' life exists somewhere, elsewhere, anywhere out there?

Let's go back to the total number of cells in all the human beings on Earth: say that our sun is represented by a single person on the entire planet. And sifting through ALL the other people on Earth, she's the only person that supports a planet like our own, one that supports life forms. One in six billion people. Now take this one person that supports life forms and multiply her by 50 TRILLION. In our vast universe, isn't it easier to believe that there have to be other intelligent life forms out there? (I'm tempted to put the word intelligent in quotes - can we presume ourselves to be all that intelligent?).

And how does time figure into all this? How long have we humans been at it? Thank goodness we have yet to completely destroy ourselves or our planet - but how far advanced might these other alien beings be compared to us? Maybe space travel was solved by them long ago? Maybe, and I'm stealing a famous line here, "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."

I've never been a voracious reader (had I been, my verbal score in the SAT would have been much higher), and more to the point, I've never read much science fiction (my verbal SAT score could well have been perfect) - but these concepts of space and time are probably 'old-hat' to the genre. Even as our understanding of space continues to expand.