The “Rare Earth” hypothesis is the idea that life is a staggeringly unlikely event, and that the reason we haven’t seen hide nor hair (nor scale nor weird gel-layer) of aliens is that there aren’t any. It’s had some time in the spotlight, it makes us sound very important, and it’s utterly wrong.
The Rare Earth argument ignores a number of essential factors, the first being how staggeringly huge the numbers involved are. Even the Milky Way has trillions of stars, and it’s only one of a hundred billion in the observable universe, and there have been billions of years for things to happen. Countering “it’s really unlikely” with “but there are lots of things!” might sound weak, but it’s the Rare Earthers who are taking the burden of proof - claiming that nothing happens anywhere else ever. The more places there are, the worse their argument gets.
Claims that there aren’t many suitable planets over all these stars are like hiding in a closet and claiming there’s no such thing as coffee tables - we’re now detecting planets at an ever-increasing rate, because now we have technology actually capable of detecting planets. Almost as soon as we try any new planet-detecting technique it detects a whole bunch of the things. We’re even edging into the ability to find Earth-size planets, and what do you know? There they are! And some even have water!
The second slip-up is ignoring the suitability of the laws of physics to life - or rather, the suitability of our form of life to the laws of physics. The idea of someone sitting in pre-existence limbo and tuning the weak nuclear force in order to create bald monkeys is patently ridiculous, as is the idea that only a tiny range of values could give rise to any repeating pattern - our pattern, DNA, is just the one that happened to work for the collection of constants we call reality.
Once life is possible in a universe, expecting it to occur in one place only is like leaving a loaf of bread and expecting exactly one slice to go moldy. Life just happens here - thermodynamic math has shown that amino acids simply will be built anywhere their components can be found. Since those components are on the periodic table, the literal “this is what happens in this universe” list, they’re going to be all over. Assuming aliens don’t come up with another pattern anyway (increasing the odds again).
Claiming that we’re the only life in existence is a combination of ignorance, self-importance and depression that should have a livejournal, not a scientific journal. The important work is getting ourselves out there and seeing who and/or what we can find.
Posted by Luke McKinney
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Cruising the Goldilocks Zone -The Search for Super Earths
Dead Zones in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
GAIA -Mapping the Family Tree of the Milky Way
The “Hubble Effect” -A Galaxy Insight
James Cameron & Arthur C Clarke on 2001 A Space Odyssey
Eyes on the Cosmos -European Space Agency’s Hawk 1 & Hubble’s Successor
New Phoenix Mission Technology to Search for Life
Non-Carbon Lifeforms -Why We May Overlook
The Milky Way Enigma -How Galactic Forces May Control Life on Earth
Astro-Engineering Artifacts as Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life
The Biological Universe -A New Copernican Revolution
Jupiter’s Europa & the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Earth’s Twin Habitable?
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