My main creative work is a #FreeCulture #OpenMovie #Animated #ScienceFiction "series" https://lunatics.tv which still has not really launched, but I'm still plugging away on it.
I also spend a lot of time on exploring, testing, and promoting #FOSS tools, like #Blender , #Inkscape , #Kdenlive , #Audacity , #Ardour , #PapagayoNG , #ResourceSpace , #Gitea , and #PeerTube .
In the past, I've been an #Astronomer with an interest in #BioAstronomy .
Texas. Married. 3 adult kids.
I think that it would be extraordinarily odd if it doesn't.
This is the funny thing: everything we know about the science relating to the origin and evolution of life says it should be pretty common.
But we have yet to encounter any reliable observational evidence of life beyond the Earth. There are a few hint of the possibility. But nothing definite.
But that's all very theoretical, of course. We still have a sample size of one.
Despite discussion of the "Fermi Paradox", this isn't necessarily any kind of real "paradox".
There's still a LOT of room for explanations. We have essential no basis for understanding what happens to intelligent civilizations like ours in a million (or a billion) years.
Civilizations may become invisible to us in some way (not necessarily by ending).
But personally, I think the most likely thing is that the "Great Barrier" is what we on Earth call the "Cambrian Explosion".
This is the transition from single-celled life to mutlicellular life (more or less).
And it took 3.2 BILLION years to build up to that. Because simple cells existed 3.8 GYA, but multicellular doesn't happen until 600MYA.
Why? Presumably because evolution had to invent the "eukaryotic cell", which is a very complicated piece of machinery.
By contrast, the basic cells show up as soon as the Earth is cool enough to accommodate them. Which means they emerged in just a 100 million years or less.
So, clearly the genesis of life is pretty simple.
But making a complex cell with a well-developed metabolism and sufficient free-energy to support the many functions needed for multicellular life to develop, is pretty hard/slow.
MAYBE most worlds don't have a stable environment long enough for that to happen?
Yeah, that's almost certainly true.
Though the relative likelihood of multicellular life forms might be anywhere from a few percent to "almost never happens".
It may also be predictable -- if there is life on Europa, for example, it's had a similar kind of stability over the life of our solar system, so we might _expect_ multicellular life if life ever formed there.
BUT... everything is extrapolated from a single example. We have "anecdotal evidence" only.
Terry Hancock
Chris Trottier