Do you believe there are other habitalble planets in the galaxy/universe?

Question

According to the Drake Equation, maybe, but according to you?

Answer 1

Yes, I believe there are many other habitable planets in our galaxy alone. And many billions of other habitable planets in all the other galaxies.

Since you asked the question the way you did (i.e. "habitable" instead of "inhabited") it can be interpreted as any planet that may even be barren but that could be inhabited (as if for example human beings went there and brought all the technology they neeed to establish self sufficient colonies. That planet would be considered habitable because (using technology) it supported human habitation.

Using a narrow interpretation of your terms, where we assume that what you mean is a planet that has all the necessary conditions to allow people to colonise it without massive advanced technologies, then I would still say that there are probably thousands of such planets in our galaxy (not as many as the previous category, but still a very large number of them). And this opinion, I base on my belief that there is nothing remarkable about our little corner of the universe. The same processes and the same phonomena that created the Solar system are happening all over the Universe, everywhere.

Since there are 100 to 150 billion stars in our galaxy, it would be statistically probable that a fair percentage of those star systems woluld be similar to our own Solar system and, therefore, would have a similar planetary arrangement.

Answer 2

Definately in the Solar System. Scientists have something called the Goldilocks Zone, which is a zone in which the conditions for life existing are possible. In the Goldilocks Zone are the planets Venus, Earth, and Mars. Earth, luckily, is directly in the middle of of the Goldilocks Zone. Mars could support life, but only if we had our own biosystem. Venus has an intensly hot atmosphere, but has chemicals that chemophiliac bacteria could live upon. Mars has the potential to support life. Both receive enough external energy from the Sun to indeed support life.

As to having life in other parts of the galaxy, who's to say there isn't another solar system similar to ours somewhere out there? It is a big universe...
Hope this answers you question. nasa.gov has a lot of information on this subject (obviously).

Answer 3

Absolutely, and if there are not, it would seem an awful waste of space, to have a Universe of this size with only one inhabitable planet.