Very cool post. It is interesting to think about this: our sun sits in a 'local bubble' with other stars that reside within a local collection of 'interstellar gas.' The gas and debris between our local starts are believed to be from previous supernova. The sun itself is believed to have formed from these same type of gasses and leftovers. The point is, there is a temporal component to all of this. What we see today (locally) is the 2nd, 3rd, or nth iteration of star and planet formation. It is likely that other 'solar systems' existed in this same little part of our galaxy long before this one!!! It increases the probabilities of life dramatically. It's not just that life could exist elsewhere, but that it would have had many chances over the evolution of the visible universe. It is hard to imagine that life wouldn't have formed elsewhere, at some point.
What's hard to imagine is that this is what 4 million years of evolution gets us.
Thanks for reading and for adding some meat to the bones of a subject I find fascinating and compelling. Maybe that's where we can focus our thoughts for the foreseeable future.
Very cool post. It is interesting to think about this: our sun sits in a 'local bubble' with other stars that reside within a local collection of 'interstellar gas.' The gas and debris between our local starts are believed to be from previous supernova. The sun itself is believed to have formed from these same type of gasses and leftovers. The point is, there is a temporal component to all of this. What we see today (locally) is the 2nd, 3rd, or nth iteration of star and planet formation. It is likely that other 'solar systems' existed in this same little part of our galaxy long before this one!!! It increases the probabilities of life dramatically. It's not just that life could exist elsewhere, but that it would have had many chances over the evolution of the visible universe. It is hard to imagine that life wouldn't have formed elsewhere, at some point.
What's hard to imagine is that this is what 4 million years of evolution gets us.
Thanks for reading and for adding some meat to the bones of a subject I find fascinating and compelling. Maybe that's where we can focus our thoughts for the foreseeable future.