I’m being semi-facetious of course, I just always found it a bit funny to assume that life either only exists on Earth or on Earth and then like a few other planets. Presumably if life exists anywhere beyond Earth it would be safe to assume that life would be everywhere and not uncommon at all, for reasons of panspermia and because it would indicate life is an inevitable chemical process that would naturally spring up around the Universe.
I’d say that the two extremes- life being unique to Earth, and life being ubiquitous in the Universe, are both more reasonable positions than life being unique only to Earth and just a few other places.
I am a strong proponent of life being ubiquitous, because the Universe doesn’t do “one off” phenomena, and as per my previous argument, if it’s in more places than here, it’s going to be everywhere. That’s only my intuition, of course, we can’t meaningfully say scientifically which is the case without more data either way.
But to address the original argument- if we would say that life is indeed everywhere, then that would seriously diminish the interest of any would-be advanced alien civilization because they’d likely have seen it before. Interesting, sure, but not world-shattering, or even important enough to warrant direct communication, just like finding a new species of orchid deep in an Amazonian jungle would be interesting to botanists and maybe be photographed and put in a magazine but not even make the faintest blip on the radar of the corpus of scientific discovery as a whole.
I’m being semi-facetious of course, I just always found it a bit funny to assume that life either only exists on Earth or on Earth and then like a few other planets. Presumably if life exists anywhere beyond Earth it would be safe to assume that life would be everywhere and not uncommon at all, for reasons of panspermia and because it would indicate life is an inevitable chemical process that would naturally spring up around the Universe.
I’d say that the two extremes- life being unique to Earth, and life being ubiquitous in the Universe, are both more reasonable positions than life being unique only to Earth and just a few other places.
I am a strong proponent of life being ubiquitous, because the Universe doesn’t do “one off” phenomena, and as per my previous argument, if it’s in more places than here, it’s going to be everywhere. That’s only my intuition, of course, we can’t meaningfully say scientifically which is the case without more data either way.
But to address the original argument- if we would say that life is indeed everywhere, then that would seriously diminish the interest of any would-be advanced alien civilization because they’d likely have seen it before. Interesting, sure, but not world-shattering, or even important enough to warrant direct communication, just like finding a new species of orchid deep in an Amazonian jungle would be interesting to botanists and maybe be photographed and put in a magazine but not even make the faintest blip on the radar of the corpus of scientific discovery as a whole.