impressed…from planet to universe.
A deep question that has taunted us is one that regards the emergence of life on our planet, specifically intelligent life. How common can it be in the Universe? We don’t know the precise values for the drake equation but a detail that is now emerging is the abundance of exoplanets out there. Many of these lie in the stars’ Goldilocks zone, 68 Earth-sized have been spotted so far and that’s only on the same orbital plane as the Kepler telescope observing them. Nevertheless that is still a long way from answering the question: how likely is it life will emerge? Did it happen here?
There are the famous experiments that created simple amino acids in conditions similar to early Earth but these never continued to the more complex aminos. An emerging idea suggest we may yet have arisen from the most basic building blocks of matter. We definitely evolved from the lower animals here, but what happened before? Are we offspring of an alien panspermia project? Such a scheme is being proposed, yet I see no logical purpose. The microscopic organism sent to another world would have no memetic relationship to us and barely any genetic similarity to our bodies. Life for life’s sake in this way offsets any possibility of a local origin. It must have begun somewhere...
...which brings us back to the notion of creation. Tsk. How much does it say about creationist desperation when they mine scientific data so thoroughly? The vid above shows the inhospitable nature of the universe and why the Stelliferous era is a Wonder of the Universe.
