Common yeast can survive Martian conditions

Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%, Panspermia is starting to feel more and more likely.

Something to blow your mind with. The early days in the universe there were millions of years were the average temperature in the universe supported liquid water.

I don't think millions of years is long enough for anything interesting to happen life-wise, is it?

hard to know with so few data points

On the one hand, (primitive) life appeared on Earth almost as soon as conditions allowed it.

On the other, the early universe — this particular "warm bath" era — had approximately zero oxygen with which to make water. Right temperature, just (IIRC, but I'm not certain) zero stars yet, so nothing to make things heavier than what came out of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.

all of those theories depend on one assumption, that life and our existence are products of a purely random collision of events.

IMHO, "We don't know" is the only answer to the question of how many planets have life on them or the probability of some forms of live existing somewhere. 0 is as valid as 10^128 until more than one other life supporting planet or moon is found to establish some baseline for speculation. otherwise, we're talking sci-fi here, in which case I think stargate's version seems decent.

Okay, but this is the average temperature of a big cloud of hydrogen with oxygen yet to be invented right?

>hard to know with so few data points

i've yelled at the interns several times but none have been able to set up a haldane soup focus group yet

>Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%

I'm fully with you that the sheer number of planets is one of, if not the most powerful data point we know for sure, that points toward the plausibility of extraterrestrial life. One thing I haven't heard discussed a whole lot though is, what if it's a tug of war, between a preposterously large number of planets, and a correspondingly preposterously small chance of life, that is every bit as impressively small as the number of planets is impressively big?

For whatever reason, it seems like the default attitude is to treat the sheer volume of planets like they more than compensate for the rarity of life. But what it doesn't work like that? There are different versions of this argument that apply to any life at all, and then to intelligent life, so take your pick for the more interesting question.

But in principle it seems like life, and especially multicellular and even more especially intelligent life, very well could be kind of vanishingly rare that's effectively a match in rareness to the universe's vastness.

There is the old theory about how life is entropy accelerating, and therefore in a grand sense the emergence of life is thermodynamically favored. Though, that says nothing about the absolute chance of it occurring.[1] Our observable universe is far from infinite.

[1] Though maybe it does speak to life tending toward evolving more complex, energy consuming systems, and its propensity to spread out into the universe.

I kinda like the optimistic perspective that humanity emerged preposterously early. Like the age of the universe is a mere ~14 billion years. It's basically nothing imo. Star formation is predicted to keep going for about 100 trillion years. So from that perspective we are only about 0.1% of the way through the current cosmic era.

When I think about our genomic complexity and how many neat little things are encoded in there, it's mindboggling to me how quickly it evolved. Like there are so many little wonders in the body. Just a few billion years of throwing shit at the wall?!

[delayed]