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What are your thoughts on life on other worlds?
Personally I think life is extremely common but more complex life not so much.
I think the building blocks for life are everywhere its like the universe is in a sperm soup.
Life started on earth pretty much the second it stopped being a hellscape where even microbes couldn't survive.
However it took almost 3 billion years to go from basic life to complex life. And I think our planet may have had a few advantages to help accelerate evolution; Stable enough to not be wiped out, not too stable as to stagnate (mass extinction events seem to promote new explosions of evolution), lots of water, a planet where the tectonic plates and magnetic shield didn't stop.
I think our advantageous position has allowed us to be one of the first if not the first intelligent life in our galaxy. So when we dream about advanced aliens millions of years ahead of us colonizing the stars we are imagining our own future and we will be the super advanced life going to meet new fledgling civilizations as they evolve.
Imagine life on a tidally locked planet around a red dwarf it could take 3 times as long to reach the same point of evolution we are at or more even. Or on a planet like Europa where if complex life exists its under 3000 feet of ice unlikely to ever develop technology no matter how intelligent it gets.
Or life on a paradise planet thats super stable so no mass extinction events wipe out dinosaur level life it could take an extra billion years to get to the intelligent stage.
And in most cases I doubt life even exists the 3 billion years needed to reach complex life; impacts by stellar objects, magnetic field failures, cosmic ray sterilization.
So although life itself is probably everywhere quite literally, I think advanced life is very slow to emerge in most places. But life finds a way so even on less ideal planets it could still reach the stage of intelligence, it would just take a lot longer. It could take 12 billion years for some planets so for these cases even if life seeded at the same time as us it would be another 8 billion years before they start reaching for the stars.
By this same reasoning however its also possible in the universe as a whole there could be a handful of civilizations that got luckier than us and are already billions of years ahead of us, I think that would be very very rare though as planets with good stars in stable locations long enough that early would be unlikely.
The blackhole cores of galaxies could easily sterilize everything in them especially early on preventing life anywhere from taking hold until the core calms down. And early galaxies had far more super nova constantly sterilizing everything.
We just got lucky.
If we are the first and over the next billion years we will see more appear what will be our response? Will we be the conquerors of sci-fi or the benevolent helpers from another world?
#space
Personally I think life is extremely common but more complex life not so much.
I think the building blocks for life are everywhere its like the universe is in a sperm soup.
Life started on earth pretty much the second it stopped being a hellscape where even microbes couldn't survive.
However it took almost 3 billion years to go from basic life to complex life. And I think our planet may have had a few advantages to help accelerate evolution; Stable enough to not be wiped out, not too stable as to stagnate (mass extinction events seem to promote new explosions of evolution), lots of water, a planet where the tectonic plates and magnetic shield didn't stop.
I think our advantageous position has allowed us to be one of the first if not the first intelligent life in our galaxy. So when we dream about advanced aliens millions of years ahead of us colonizing the stars we are imagining our own future and we will be the super advanced life going to meet new fledgling civilizations as they evolve.
Imagine life on a tidally locked planet around a red dwarf it could take 3 times as long to reach the same point of evolution we are at or more even. Or on a planet like Europa where if complex life exists its under 3000 feet of ice unlikely to ever develop technology no matter how intelligent it gets.
Or life on a paradise planet thats super stable so no mass extinction events wipe out dinosaur level life it could take an extra billion years to get to the intelligent stage.
And in most cases I doubt life even exists the 3 billion years needed to reach complex life; impacts by stellar objects, magnetic field failures, cosmic ray sterilization.
So although life itself is probably everywhere quite literally, I think advanced life is very slow to emerge in most places. But life finds a way so even on less ideal planets it could still reach the stage of intelligence, it would just take a lot longer. It could take 12 billion years for some planets so for these cases even if life seeded at the same time as us it would be another 8 billion years before they start reaching for the stars.
By this same reasoning however its also possible in the universe as a whole there could be a handful of civilizations that got luckier than us and are already billions of years ahead of us, I think that would be very very rare though as planets with good stars in stable locations long enough that early would be unlikely.
The blackhole cores of galaxies could easily sterilize everything in them especially early on preventing life anywhere from taking hold until the core calms down. And early galaxies had far more super nova constantly sterilizing everything.
We just got lucky.
If we are the first and over the next billion years we will see more appear what will be our response? Will we be the conquerors of sci-fi or the benevolent helpers from another world?
#space
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