Alien life? Likely or complete crap? [News]

I’m so confused. One day Stephen Hawking says that he thinks that primitive life is extremely common across the universe while intelligent life is rare– but out there somewhere. Now someone else (who is not wheelchair bound and can actually still use computers and do math) is saying he thinks that it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll ever find anything other than the most primitive of bacteria. Across the entire universe.

So which is it? Life or no life? If you go by the track record, excluding Scientological nonsense, the case isn’t all that great– god knows we’ve tried to find life among the stars but have pretty much come up empty handed. But if you look at the statistics, you might say that it’s highly statistically likely that somewhere– somewhere, at least one place, there’s got to be what we might consider intelligent life.

But then, as this guy Watson points out in the Discovery Channel article, the conditions for life to form at all are so specific, so rare that it’s hard to imagine that a planet like ours has occurred twice. If you think about what makes Earth so unique in relation to life, it’s easy to see the argument:

-Earth is the perfect distance from our Sun so that organic life neither burns or freezes
-Earth, with its Moon keeping its rotation constant, keeps our gravity at a nice level– not too low where microscopic life forms would have a hard time getting bigger and not too high where large creatures become an impossibility lest they be crushed.
-Jupiter is at the perfect distance to suck up large bodies that would otherwise rain down on our planet on a regular basis, making it very difficult for life to grow at all, but just the right distance away so that we don’t get thrown off orbit.

Watson pieced together his mathematical model by examining four critical stages that needed to occur in a particular order for intelligent life to arise on Earth. He then factored in how long a planet like Earth is suitable for habitation.

The steps include the emergence of single-celled bacteria, complex cells, specialized cells allowing for complex life forms and finally intelligent life with an established language.

“Complex life is separated from the simplest life forms by several very unlikely steps and therefore will be much less common. Intelligence is one step further, so it is much less common still,” Watson said.

Based on the model, Watson said each stage of evolution had at most a 10 percent chance of occurring, and each development could manifest only after each proceeding step. Further, the evolutionary stepping-stones are spaced evenly throughout Earth’s history, Watson added.

It’s highly unlikely that we’ll stop imagining alien races any time soon, because honestly it’s just too much fun to think, but which is it? Is the universe teeming with all sorts of strange aliens a la Star Wars or Doctor Who or in the far future, will the only massive space battles we’ll be having be amongst ourselves as in Dune and Battlestar Galactica? Will the only time we’ll ever actually see the phrase “alien invasion” in the news really be just related to Mexican immigration? Say it ain’t so.