RE: Scientists: 100 million worlds may have complex alien life in our galaxy
June 9, 2014 at 2:22 pm
I'm wondering what the likelihood is of life of any kind developing at the same time as it did here. How long after the big bang were there planets that could host life? I wonder how many worlds out there already went through a cycle where they developed life, it evolved and filled every available ecological niche, and then it all died out either via resource-depletion, or a meteor strike, or their sun collapsing, etc. Or how many worlds are still in the process of getting started. How many planets out there are in the midst of their own Cambrian explosion?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
