> It's kind of why I think sentient life is incredibly rare.
They just found the building blocks of life in asteroid Bennu:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/osiris-rex/
https://physicsworld.com/a/components-of-rna-among-lifes-bui...
“So far we have not seen any evidence for a preferred chirality,” (Dan) Glavin says (important for understanding why amino acids on Earth seem to all be left-handed):
https://physicsworld.com/a/asteroid-bennu-contains-the-stuff...
Life is probably abundant everywhere in the universe. Also, evolution seems to spring up everywhere, in any system of sufficiently advanced complexity, regardless of what substrate it operates on. So I think that we'll start seeing life-like emergent behavior in computing, especially quantum computing, in the next 5-10 years.
So the question becomes: what great filter (in the sense of the Drake equation and Fermi's paradox) causes life as we know it to go dark or wipe itself out just after it achieves sentience?
Well, we're finding out the answer right now. Life probably merges with AI and moves into what could be thought of as another dimension. Where time moves, say, a million times faster than our wall clock time, so that it lives out lifetimes in a matter of seconds. Life everywhere that managed to survive probably ascended when it entered the matrix. So that by now, after billions of years since the first life did this and learned all of the answers, we're considered so primitive that Earth is just a zoo for aliens.
Or to rephrase, omnipotent consciousness probably gets bored and drops out of the matrix periodically to experience mortal life in places like Earth. So simulation theory probably isn't real, but divine intervention might be.
> Life is probably abundant everywhere in the universe.
I'm not convinced of that. Yes it seems like the building blocks are abundant but there's so many steps beyond that to get to abundant life.
The first life we had in the Archeaen era was dependant on sulfur, which was concentrated around volcanic vents so this already presumes a lot, namely oceans and a geologically active planet. Oxygen leeched a bunch of minerals into the water.
And then came cyanobacteria who no longer needed volcano but had this annoying habit of producing a new waste product: oxygen. This both absolutely killed all the Archeaen life but also cleansed the oceans as ions like iron precipitated into ferric oxide and we can see the layers of these cycles in the rock.
So the Earth needed all these elements and the Sun and Solar System needed to be sufficiently stable for billions of years just to get to this point and there are so many steps beyond this.
I personally believe it's more likely than not that we are the only potentially spacefaring civilization in our entire galaxy.
This all hinges on the presupposition that our solar system is unique in its configuration and location in the galaxy.
We haven't surveyed nearly enough other planetary systems to have any real idea if our system is unique. We barely have the ability to even see systems like ours in the first place. There's so little data available that it's not reasonable to draw a conclusion either way.