Could Earth Be The Only / Last Planet With Life In The Whole Universe?

[dr wu]

Just curious but why is this in the 'conspiracy' forum...?
It's more in the line of speculative science .

 

[EnolaGaia]

Just curious but why is this in the 'conspiracy' forum...?

I've no idea why ...

It's more in the line of speculative science .

Good point ... I'm moving it to New Science.

 

[pandacracker]

Here's a scary thought - this is the refuge planet after we knackered our old one.

Jeanette Winterson plays with this idea in the first part of her book "The Stone Gods"

 

[Paul_Exeter]

I feel the Rare Earth hypotheses is being jumped on by people genuinely fearful of climate change to advance the argument of how precious our planet is.

yes, it has taken an incredible process of luck, disaster, time and opportunity for ‘intelligent’ life to evolve on this planet, but the universe is larger than we can comprehend and such processes will have played themselves out over and over for aeons.

furthermore, there could be a planet relatively close-by where the human-like inhabitants are akin to neothlthic hunter gatherers and so won’t be advertising their presence any day soon.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Study reveals life in the universe could be common, but not in our neighborhood

... To help answer one of the great existential questions—how did life begin?—a new study combines biological and cosmological models. Professor Tomonori Totani from the Department of Astronomy looked at how life's building blocks could spontaneously form in the universe—a process known as abiogenesis. ...

This Live Science article - based on the same research publication - provides a slightly different interpretation of Totani's research and its results.

Is life a gamble? Scientist models universe to find out

... Tomonori Totani, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Tokyo, modeled the microscopic world of molecules across the epic scale of the entire universe to see if abiogenesis is a likely candidate for the origin of life. He was essentially looking at whether there were enough stars with habitable planets in the universe at the time to allow complexity to arise. His results, published Feb. 3 in the journal Nature, show the betting odds for life emerging are not good, at least for the observable universe. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/origin-of-life-rna-universe-model.html

In any case, here's Totani's published research report:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0