To this day there has never appeared any confirmed scientific evidence supporting the theory that life forms exist on other planets. Of course, there have been instances where people claimed that they met aliens or actually saw UFOs. But scientifically, no conclusive proof has been discovered so far of the existence of life on other planets or in other galaxies. This might dramatically change. Scientists believe the newly discovered Kepler-452b is the most Earth-like planet yet. Discovered by astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope, Kepler-452b is most likely five times that of Earth. If it is rocky, which cannot yet be determined, the world would likely still have active volcanism and its gravity could be roughly twice that on our own planet. Most intriguing, this new planet might be small and cool enough to host liquid water on its surface — and might therefore be hospitable to life. The six billion years Kepler-452b has been around is considerable time and opportunity for life to arise somewhere on its surface or in its oceans, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this new planet. Considering that there are life forms on Earth that have adapted to live in so many different environments, from air to the bottom of the ocean, it's hard to believe that there wouldn't be a variety of life forms on a planet where temperatures are at least reasonable. Some of the creatures we have found are in some of the most in-hospitable places on this Earth. They could be found elsewhere. Furthermore, life forms could exist on Kepler-452b given the additional two billion years they have had to evolve. What could be another of most fascinating aspects of Kepler-452b is that it could project what the future holds for our own planet. While similar in size and brightness to the sun, Kepler-452b's host star is 1.5 billion years older than ours. Scientists therefore believe it could point to a possible future for the Earth. The increasing energy from its aging sun might be heating the surface and evaporating any oceans. The water vapor would be lost from the planet forever. Kepler-452b thus could be experiencing now what the Earth will undergo more than a billion years from now. Perhaps the universe is teaming with intelligent life but the distances are just too great for any kind of contact. Kepler-452b is so far away that if there is intelligent life there they could never get here and we could never get there. It would take 1,400 years to get there traveling at the speed of light. Scientists will need much stronger telescopes to actually see the planet, and get some insight into what's going on there. The James Webb Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch in October 2018, and will be 100 times more powerful than Hubble, making it capable of seeing events that happened in the universe 13.5 billion years ago. NASA plans to use the telescope to perform an atmospheric analysis of Kepler-452b, providing some important information on just how habitable it really is. Aliens and UFOs have provided great scope for the kind of fiction that appeals to people's imagination. And the universe is such an enormous entity that we cannot discount the possibility of life existing, as on Earth, in some remote planet in one of the millions of galaxies. Finding an Earth-like planet does much to increase the probability that life exists beyond our solar system. As one NASA mission controller put it, today, Earth is a little less lonely.
