Hi,

I think it will be very hard to prove a statement like that - it would be hard to be sure there was not just one more place we should have looked!

There are a number of places in our own solar system we want to search more closely for life. We have already begun to explore Mars. Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, might be interesting too.

We are also hunting for planets around other stars and finding lots of them. It is hard to find ones as small as Earth, but I think we will discovere some in the next few years. Then we would have to come up with ways to try to detect life from so far away, which is tricky. Maybe some day a long time from now we may even be able to send probes to other stars of go ourselves. Maybe after we had gone to lots of other star systems if we did not find any life we might give up looking, but there would always be a chance it existed in some other part of the universe.

If I had to bet, though, I would bet that there is some sort of life out there. We just can't prove it yet.

Terry