Is life an extremely rare thing in the universe?

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Did I say anything discouraging that? What I said was that we can safely consider ourselves 'intelligent'. Didn't say 'most' intelligent, 'only intelligence' or anything of the nature, my friend.

We haven't even really managed to get a fair idea as to how many Earth-like planets there are in the universe. I would think that, on an Earth-like planet, under Earth-like conditions, life would be fairly inevitable. However, the form it would take is not as clear. There could be millions of Earth-like planets: half of them would be covered in mold, a fourth of them would have only forms of life that are not visible to the naked eye, a few thousand of them might have some kind of large sea life or another, maybe a few hundred would have trees similar in appearance to ours, and maybe one would have a life-form on it that is about as close to sentience as a tufted titmouse.

Now, let's take a million of the planets that have something that is at least as close to sentience as a tufted titmouse. Half of them most likely wouldn't have anything on them that could even potentially evolve into sentient life within the life expectancy of the Cosmos, okay? It could be a single species of mold that has a physical limit as to how far its evolution could possibly go. Now, let's take the other half. Let's say that a few hundred of them have a life-form that is built anything like a human intelligence, period.

Therefore, what I am really trying to say is that I consider it almost inevitable that there is "life on other worlds," probably in some far-off galaxy an intelligence like ours. However, I don't think that we ought to consider our main mission in existence to go off looking for it. Even if we were to find it, we might find that we don't get along very well, and we surely have better things to do with our lives than make ourselves a pest to our neighbors.

DNA is a helix, it spirals round along it's structure. All spirals twist either to the left or to the right, a left handed spiral is the exact opposite of a right handed spiral.

In the lab, the odds of DNA spiralling left or right is exactly 50:50, but in nature on earth all the DNA twists the same way, every cell in man, every bacteria and every virus the same.

If life had arisen multiple times, evolvedand made it to the present day, we would expected ecosystems to contain a mix of left and right handed spiralling DNA, but they don't.

Interestingly enough, (speculation time) if you take lefty plants to a righty planet they will probably thrive because they be immune to infection but still able to absorb nutrients.

If you take lefty animals to a righty planet the animals will die of starvation because they can't digest the complex right chirality proteins from the native righty plants and animals.

The term intelligent may be applied to any biota capable of learning from experience.

Humans probably give too much weight to their gift of gab.

ruveyn

It is only possible to answer that question about extraterrestrial life with yes.
If there would be no other life in the universe than we wouldn't know if if we have not found it or if there is realy no other life in the universe.
But if we find other life we are able to answer this question with yes.
I wouldn't say that the humanity is intelligent.
I'm optimistic about extraterrestrial life.

We can solve problems and sometimes learn from our experience. That makes us intelligent.

ruveyn

The store of information and knowledge is maybe one characteristic of intelligence.
But using the information is often the problem.
If a civilization destroyed itself, by self-made ​​errors it is not intelligent.
Nowadays we do not know whether we solve our own mistakes or not.

By that logic, no species would ever be considered intelligent prior to a destruction moment, a civilization which lasted 1 billion years, would per your logic not be intelligent because its still not established that it won't at some point destroy itself.

In your logic, you'd need a time machine to decide whether or not a civilization or species is intelligent.

Problems are solved every day of the year and mistakes are corrected. It happens all the time.

ruveyn

I did not mean that any civilization that fails is unintelligent.
I want to say that a civilization which is knowingly wasting ressources and environment isn't intelligent.
Also in some periods a civilization could be intelligent but in other periods not.
If a civilization is solving problems or mistakes it is of course intelligent.

This might be an outlandish thought, but maybe when they say "intelligent", they're comparing humans to every other organism on the planet.

So can bacteria, ants and lab rats.

Perhaps it would be better to use term technologically advanced civilisation when we refer to looking for 'intelligent life' as that is what we really mean?

ruveyn -- cockroaches have been around for thousands of years by solving problems and correcting mistakes: they will be around thousands of years after we're gone. Are cockroaches therefore a very intelligent specie?

Let's be clear: matter is extremely rare in the universe. It's an awfully big space, with very little "stuff" floating around in it.

Of that matter, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are pretty minor constituents, so organic matter is rarer still.

And then getting all those twisty-bendy bits of carbon-based organic compounds to start behaving regular ways is another step down the path of "rare."

But, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen always behave the same way, everywhere that they are found in the similar environments. The methane on Titan is no less organic than the methane on earth. It stands to reason that anywhere in the universe where these four elements are to be found together at a temperature that will permit them to bond, organic molecules will arise.

It's a leap from water and methane to get to amino acids, to be sure. But it's not a miraculous one--merely an increasing level of rarity among atoms that are already rare.

if you take in too account exotic biologies. Life is probably very frequent phenomenon.

In theory, you could replace water with an other liquids (alcohol, liquid metals, liquid He, etc). C with other atoms of the carbon family or nitrogen family( examples Si,N). O2 with other chalcogens/halogens (example Cl). You could play with temperatures and pressure, etc.

The point is, the possibilities are so vast. That its extremely limiting to look just for water and carbon.