Re: why are the stars so far away? And is there life outter space?

Hi, Devin,
Those are good questions, and it's hard to answer all of them, but I'll try:

No one knows why the stars are so far away. They just are. We can measure how far away they are, but we don't know why.

The reason the stars don't fall onto Earth is that they are very, very, very far away. Things fall because of gravity. Gravity is a force which makes everything pull on everything else. The bigger a thing is, the more gravity it has, and the closer a thing is, the more it feels the gravity. The Earth is pretty big, so when we stand close to it (right on top of it!) we can feel it pulling us down. Stars are even bigger than the Earth. However, the stars are so far away that they hardly feel any gravity from the Earth, so they don't fall towards it. (Alternately, the Earth is so far away from the stars, it doesn't fall into them, which is a good thing!)

No one knows whether or not there's life outside of Earth. We haven't found any yet, but it's really hard to look, and we've only just begun. Lots of people say they know whether there's life outside the Earth, but no one has shown any proof one way or the other. You can read more about it at The SETI Institute.

You can email me if you want to talk about this some more.

-Steve Levin