Have you seen that website that shows the solar system if the moon were only one pixel? [1] Getting from the Sun to Pluto takes a very long time you might give up and close your browser tab. Many theories attempt to explain why we haven’t yet encountered extraterrestrial civilizations. One possibility is that, given the immense scale of the cosmos, intelligent life may exist but is simply too far away for contact. An…
> rarely, if ever, evolves beyond primitive intelligence. Given the complexity of the Periodic Table, molecules, DNA, &c can we agree that life is a low-probability event? Previous paragraph omits the contextual perfection of our planet/solar system. Seems fair to assert that we are a one-shot deal, until proven otherwise, here on Terra Fermi.
Given how quickly life started on Earth after Earth's formation, it seems like it isn't a low-probability event, but it still might be considering it's the only place we've found life (not that we've made a dent in our search of the cosmos for life).
"Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." - Stephen Jay Gould.
> Previous paragraph omits the contextual perfection of our planet/solar system.
It's perfect because it's the world we grew up in.