Rare earth
"While it is widely believed that complex life is common, even widespread, throughout the billions of stars and galaxies of our Universe, astrobiologists Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee argue that advanced life may, in fact, be very rare, perhaps even unique.". "Ward and Brownlee question underlying assumptions and take us on a search for life that reaches from the volcanic hot springs deep on our ocean floors to the frosty face of Europa, Jupiter's icy moon. In the process, we learn that, while microbial life may well be more prevalent throughout the Universe than previously believed, the conditions necessary for the evolution and survival of higher life - and here the authors consider everything from DNA to plate tectonics to the role of our Moon - are so complex and precarious that they are unlikely to arise in many other places, if at all."--BOOK JACKET.
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- Suggested reading: Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter D. Ward and Donald E. Brownlee. The basic premise is that complex life is incredibly rare, because only through a series of effectively chance events, did complex life happen on Earth.
Even if each of those events were actually inevitable, planet size, radiation received from host star, exact chemical makeup of atmosphere/oceans and any number of other variables could affect the time scale for a planet to fruit.
- A good book that explores some of these factors for our environment is Rare Earth by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee.
While it's true that life "out there" may look vastly different, I feel like sometimes ET-optimists use that as a hand-wavy defense that overlooks two curious details: First, we haven't found any different-looking-life-out-there on, say, Venus, or Mars... so clearly even in a solar system with some "lucky" aspects for life there are plenty of environments where life just doesn't "find a way." Second, the relative quickness with which our kind of life appeared in Earth's history suggests an oddity that we haven't even found other examples of our-general-kind-of-life out there.
A good book that explores some of the proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox is Where is Everybody? by Stephen Webb. (It does a good job using math to explain why it's a little surprising that we haven't found ET life even within our own galaxy, and it does a good job knocking down most of the sociological explanations by noting that it would require every other civilization in the galaxy to behave that way with no exceptions.)
- Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe by Ward and Brownlee is a fantastic read on the subject.
- If you are interested in these issues a great book to read is called "Rare Earth:Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe" by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. They make a convincing argument (to me anyway) that bacteria and simple life forms are probably common in the universe but animals and complex life with intelligence might be exceedingly rare. We, quite possibly, could be the only intelligent life in the universe.
- I'm reading Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, which talks about the Cambrian explosion as well, in the context of the search for extraterrestrial life. It's perhaps a little dated, but a good read.
- The book Rare Earth covers this topic throughly. The conclusion they come to is that complex, multicellular life is likely extremely rare in the universe. But simple, microbial life may be much more common than we think.
http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/d...
