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The discovery of alien life in our Universe is inevitable as mankind continues to push back the boundaries of space exploration, according to recently returned astronauts from the International Space Station.
STS-123 crew portrait. From the right (front row) are astronauts Dominic L. Gorie, commander; and Gregory H. Johnson, pilot. From the left (back row) are astronauts Richard M. Linnehan, Robert L. Behnken, Garrett E. Reisman, Michael J. Foreman and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\'s (JAXA) Takao Doi, all mission specialists.Credit: NASA
Crew members of the sixteen day STS-123 Endeavour mission, which returned to Earth in March, say while they did not see evidence of extraterrestrial life during their stay at the ISS, they were confident the scale of the solar system they witnessed held possibilities for other life forms to have evolved.
"If we push back boundaries far enough, I'm sure eventually we'll find something out there," said Mike Foreman, a mission specialist on the Endeavour, "Maybe not as evolved as we are, but it's hard to believe that there is not life somewhere else in this great universe," he told a news conference in Tokyo.
Foreman's colleague on the mission, Japanese astronaut Takao Doi agreed that, "Life like us must exist elsewhere in the universe." Doi took part in the latest successful mission to ferry the Japanese Space Agency's "Kibo" space laboratory to the International Space Station along with the installation of the Canadian-built Dextre robotic arm on the orbiting space station.
The robust debate took place in Tokyo as the astronauts answered questions about the existence of alien forms and the possibility of encountering them in a space rendezvous.
"As we travel in the space, we don't know what we'll find. That's the beauty of what we do. I hope that someday we'll find what we don't understand," said Dominic Gorie, the crew commander and veteran NASA astronaut. He added that explorers of previous centuries had no idea what they would encounter as they took off on their journeys of exploration.
However his colleague Richard Linnehan told reporters we had taken only "...baby steps in outer space efforts and we left our planet barely a few hundred miles above the atmosphere."
The press conference took place amongst recent debate by Japanese politicians over the country's obligations should Earth be attacked by alien forces. Japan has had a pacifist constitution since World War II, forbidding it to take up arms except in defence of its own national territory.
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