RE: Milky Way Could Contain 100 Million Planets with Complex Life
June 1, 2014 at 6:57 pm
(This post was last modified: June 1, 2014 at 6:59 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(June 1, 2014 at 2:56 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: 10 billion stars in the milky way? There's at least 100 billion.
On the other hand, I'd bet that less than 1% of planets can support complex life. Perhaps far less.
Since our empirical experience with complex life is limited to exactly one biochemical lineage, and our fundamental understanding of complex biochemistry is still far too sketchy to be able to predicting a priori, as oppose to merely describe ex post, most biochemical processes that made our one biochemical lineage, I would hesitate to say just how many places (not necessarily just planets) can support complex life.
I saw one theoretical model which suggests high temperature (millions of degrees) fast paced (metabolic reactions a million times faster than life on earth) iron based biochemistry and complex life ought to be theoretically possible on the extremely high gravity, high pressure environment on the surface of neutron stars.
