Scientists: 100 million worlds may have complex alien life in our galaxy

[TubbyTubby]

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?

Very interesting thoughts.

For 'intelligent' life I suppose it would depend, when a dominant life form takes hold on a planet, if it can develop a means to sustain its (inevitable) population increase that goes along with that dominance.

Discounting natural disasters such as catastrophic meteor strike, an average main sequence star gives a huge span of time for an intelligent species to take advantage of (or fuck themselves up completely before they get started).

Probability must bow to the sheer scale of the Universe and allow life to have started elsewhere, many many times, at the same time it has on Earth?

[CapnAwesome]

There are really too many variables for us to make even an inaccurate estimate on this. We really only know that life has come about on this planet and although it seems extremely likely that we are not alone, all these estimates involve a lot of speculation.

[Thumpalumpacus]

70 per cent of the current universal history had passed before Earth even formed. While the incidence of life was probably less in the youth of the Universe (due to excessive radiation, heavier elements not having formed via supernovæ, etc) it seems to me that the intervening eons would exert a leveling effect, because on the whole, bad things are as likely as good, in evolutionary terms.

[vodkafan]

I think I want to have sex with an alien woman. Unless she is like a ball of gas or looks like a lobster or something. Actually the lobster thing might not be too bad

[vorlon13]

I think I want to have sex with an alien woman. Unless she is like a ball of gas or looks like a lobster or something. Actually the lobster thing might not be too bad

Google "Lobstora"


(not for the squeamish)