• Question: is there some form of living or dead plant on another planet other than earth?

    Asked by bryony123456789 to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips, Sarah on 14 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by wilsoncwh.
    • Photo: Rhys Phillips

      Rhys Phillips answered on 11 Jun 2011:

      Quite probably somewhere in the universe – there are billions of planets out there and hardly any have actually been checked for this sort of thing. It is unlikely that plants would have ever lived on any of the other planets in our solar system though – the Earth is lucky to be at a perfect distance from the sun so that it is not too hot or too cold for things to live.

    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 11 Jun 2011:

      I’m fairly sure that there are huge numbers of planets out there with life on them — but we won’t be able to say “yes” with absolute 100% certainty until we find it. The interesting question is, will we recognise it as a plant, or as any kind of living thing, when we find it? Much of what we eventually find might be organised quite differently.

    • Photo: Helen Fletcher

      Helen Fletcher answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      I really hope so!!!

    • Photo: Sarah Cook

      Sarah Cook answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I don’t see why not but i’m not an expert!

    • Photo: Ian van der Linde

      Ian van der Linde answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      There is pretty much a 100% chance that there are both plants and animals on another planet. There is nothing unique about the earth, and it has been estimated that there are tens of thousands of planets in our galaxy at the same distance from their suns and of roughly the same size. Whatever happened on earth to start life has almost certainly happened there too, since the laws of physics and chemistry would be exactly the same there as they are here.

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