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Asked by derm1tad on 22 Feb 2024. This question was also asked by tech1apt, meet1new, keep1yes.
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Martin McCoustra answered on 22 Feb 2024:
The chemistry and physics from which created the primordial soup from which life arose on Earth are pretty universal. They won’t change from place to place or time to time. So the chances of forming a primordial soup and evolving life on a distant planet around another star are good. Whether that life is intelligent is another matter… I’d ask why would aliens want to come here anyway? Earth and our Solar System are pretty boring on a galactic standard!
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Michael C Macey answered on 30 Apr 2024: last edited 30 Apr 2024 9:24 am
Single celled microbial life – it is possible. Life as we know it requires specific elements, water and energy and these requirements could feasibly be met on other planets – for example, we know that early Mars (billions of years ago) was a water rich planet that met many of these requirements.
However, multicellular and intelligent life is less likely when we consider the number of evolutionary steps required to reach this point and the fact that mutation is random – there are no goals to evolution, the most successful organisms survive, meaning that intelligent life may not arise where there is life.
Comments
Paul commented on :
Probably. I think it would be a very silly assumption to assume there is no intelligent life (or llife of any kind) in a universe as big as ours.. never mind the theorised multiverse.
Michael C commented on :
Martin has provided a brilliant answer here – Joining in to say that I agree that the conditions in which life (as we know it) arose could definitely occur on another planet, but as 99 % of all life on Earth is single celled there is the great potential that if there is life elsewhere and it is like life on Earth it could simply only be microbes.
Life made up of multiple cells (multicellular) evolved and persisted on Earth only when the oxygen levels were able to increase significantly – this depended on a lot of things happening in specific orders. Once you have multicellular life, there are still a lot of evolutionary steps between that and intelligent life, which would depend on specific mutations occurring, becoming established and no rogue extinction events (e.g., super volcanoes or meteorites) wiping things out.
But as a microbiologist, if we did find microbes on another planet it would still definitely still be exciting, especially if we compared it to life on Earth to see the differences.