[ExI] Fermi question, possible answer

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Thu Mar 26 19:41:45 UTC 2015


On Mon, Mar 23, 2015  BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:


> > This universe seems to be 'designed' for life creation so that primitive
> life appears wherever there is a chance.


Maybe not. We only have one example to examine and it's true that life
started on Earth almost as soon as the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago,
but that could be freakishly early. This isn't just any old planet that
supports life, it supports intelligent life. If it had taken just 800
million years longer for life to get started then right about now the sun
would start to get off the main sequence and would get so hot that complex
organisms could no longer exist on the Earth.

> Advancing to intelligent life may well require another chain of unlikely
> events,


The sort of cells that all complex life is made of, Eukaryotic cells,
evolved about 2 billion years ago and some think that was even more
unlikely than the origin of life itself.

> but the universe is a pretty big place.


It all comes down to which can generate bigger numbers, astronomy or
biology.

  John K Clark





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