“But here’s the thing. What if they don’t find anything? What if, 10 years, a 100 years, a 1,000 years hence, endless sky-surveys, proddings and pokings of Mars and elsewhere, turn up nothing, save rocks, gas, ice and vacuum. We had better be prepared for this because, I am beginning to believe, this seems to be the most likely result. “
This has been my view for years. We haven’t found life anywhere else that we’ve looked, and we’ve detected no signs of it. It makes no logical sense to assume it MUST be out there, as many do, because we have no evidence that life can just randomly arise from nothing.
God so loved the earth he gave it Life
My pet theory answers that concern from the other end: scientific progress happens roughly the same way in all forms of life, culminating a little past discovery of nuclear fusion and before serious interstellar travel, when some “scientist” thinks the equivalent of “what happens when I try _this_...” and the entire planet ceases to exist.
Exactly.
We have found complex organic compounds formed naturally throughout the solar system. From this people take the leap that life must also be common.
We can also create complex organic compounds from base elements in a laboratory. But no one has ever figured out how to turn the most complex organic compounds into even the simplest form of living microbial life.
That jump required either an intelligence far greater than ours or trillions upon trillions of random occurrences that we cannot yet figure out.