what planet is most likely to have life :)

Question: what planet is most likely to have life :)
- Keywords:
  alien,
  planet,
  space
Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
- Sarah Casewell answered on 23 Jun 2014:
  
  In our solar system, not many of them! The gas planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) don’t have solid surfaces, and the rocky planets are too hot or too cold.
  There is possibility there there may be life on some of Jupiter or Saturn’s moons though. Moons like enceledaus have lakes under the surface and Titan has it’s own atmosphere made mainly of methane.
- Nate Bastian answered on 23 Jun 2014:
  
  Jupiter has a moon named “Europa” which has vast oceans of liquid water beneath its icy surface. I think that this is the most likely place, other than earth, to have life.
- Natasha Stephen answered on 23 Jun 2014:
  
  There are some moons of Jupiter and Saturn that could potentially have life or have had life in the past but the most likely planetary candidate would be Mars. As Sarah has said, the Gas Giants can’t host life because there isn’t a solid surface there for anything to live on. It would also be way too cold for life (as we know it) to survive that far away from the Sun! Mercury and Venus are both rocky planets similar to Earth so could potentially have life but they are both closer to the Sun than we are on Earth so the temperatures get too hot! It gets yp to ~480C on both Mercury and Venus at some points in their orbit so that is just way too hot for life to survive! It also rains sulphuric acid on Venus, which is really corrosive, as well as there being hundreds of volcanic eruptions occurring pumping out lots of toxic gases. It just wouldn’t be very nice!
  
  Mars on the other hand is just a bit further away from the Sun than we are on Earth so the temperatures can be quite similar; 24C at the equator during the summer! At the poles though it can still get very cold, there are ice caps and the temperature drops down to -124C, so life probably wouldn’t survive in those extremes! The atmosphere is more of a problem on Mars than the temperature though; it has a very thin atmosphere of mainly CO2, which we couldn’t survive in but some life can.
- Sam Connolly answered on 23 Jun 2014:
  
  As the others said, there aren’t many places in our solar system that are ideal for hosting life, Europa being the most likely. But beyond our solar system we’ve found thousands of other planets, and there are probably billions more to find! We haven’t found many which are very good for life yet, because smaller planets like the Earth are harder to find. But we have found a few and it looks like there are a lot more, so there are probably millions of planets that could hold life! People are mostly looking for rocky planets with an atmosphere which are about the same distance from their star as the Earth, so that there’s liquid water on them.
- Roberto Trotta answered on 23 Jun 2014:
  
  In the Solar System, we think Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, might have an underground ocean where life might be possible. This ocean might be twice the volume as Earth’s oceans all together!
  
  Europa is actually quite big — it’s about a quarter of the size of the earth, so that makes it only slightly smaller than our own moon.

Question: what planet is most likely to have life :)

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