Big Place and We Are Not Alone

A few thousand million years ago, countless millions of planetary systems must have developed around the more than one hundred million million million sun-like stars in our explorable universe. Astrophysicists have shown that our kinds of chemistry and physics prevail everywhere. We can no longer doubt that whenever conditions are right on a planet's surface, life will emerge and persist. There is no reason to believe that our own mental stature has not been excelled by sentient beings elsewhere. We are not alone.