What if We're Alone?

It looks like the odds aren't great that there is intelligent life out there. Is there anybody out there? -

A mathematical model produced by Andrew Watson, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, suggests that the odds of finding new life on other Earth-like planets are low, given the time it has taken for beings such as humans to evolve and the remaining life span of the Earth.

The Earth is about four-billion years old and only has about a billion years of habitable life yet before the swelling sun burns the last bacteria into ash. We showed up late, and took some improbable evolutionary trails before we got here.

[If] we had evolved early in this period, then even with a sample of one, we’d suspect that evolution from simple to complex and intelligent life was quite likely to occur. By contrast, we now believe that we evolved late in the habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed.”

Intelligence is not impossible, given enough time but limit the time, and out of the dross of statistical possibility (monkeys; typewriters; Shakespeare) rises this happy exception.

In the posts labeled "ontogeny + phylogeny", I'll be exploring those evolutionary steps our ancestors took and that in many cases the proto-human is taking him/herself in the womb.