Do the maths... is 42 the answer?

IT’S ALMOST New Year.

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Respectable thinking amongst the science fraternity says we are not alone

But I’m not going to look ahead over the next 12 months (I'll be doing that in the December 31 edition of this newspaper, along with my fellow Express columnists).No, I'm casting a longer view than that — 50 years or so into the future. Allow me to explain.

In my lifetime, people who speculated that there must surely be intelligent life on other worlds - or any kind of life, come to that - were mostly dismissed as cranks, wishful thinkers, or even heretics. Such thinking was seen as un-Christian: God had seen fit to make himself flesh in human form here on Earth. It was tantamount to sacrilege to suggest He may have done something similar elsewhere in His universe.