Image credit: Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) composite, via.

Did we come along at just the right time, to not only make it in our Universe, but to witness all the galaxies before dark energy pushes them away?Ī primarily ultraviolet view of the galactic center reveals a complex, intricate view of stars that. When the Universe was too young, there weren’t enough heavy elements. We are starting to approach the technological capabilities of detecting exo-atmospheres and their compositions around worlds as small as our own currently, we can get down to about Neptune-sized worlds, although the James Webb Space Telescope will advance that further in under a decade.īut aren’t there other things we need to worry about? What if we were too close to the galactic center wouldn’t the high rate of supernovae fry us, and sterilize life? What if we didn’t have a planet like Jupiter to clear out the asteroid belt wouldn’t the sheer number of asteroids flying our way wipe any life that manages to form out? And what about the fact that we’re here now, when the Universe is relatively young? Many stars will live for trillions of years, but we’ve only got about another billion or two before our Sun gets hot enough to boil our oceans. Our studies of exoplanets - of worlds around stars beyond our own - have shown us that there’s a huge variety of rocky planets orbiting at the right distance from their central stars to have liquid water on their surfaces if they have anything akin to atmospheres like our own. Kepler 186f is one of a great many candidates for a very Earth-like planet. These are all big questions, so let’s give them the care they deserve. And finally, if we don’t find life in the places and under the conditions where we expect it, can that prove the existence of God?.How rare or common are these conditions elsewhere in the Universe?.What are, scientifically, the conditions that we need for life to arise?.We’ll go through them one at a time, but here are the three, so we know what we’re getting into. This is a very compelling argument for many people, but it’s important to ask ourselves three questions to make sure we’re approaching this honestly. Otherwise, the argument goes, the odds of us coming to be would be so infinitesimally small that it’s unreasonable to believe it could have happened by chance.

The emergence of intelligent life is so outlandishly unexpected, given all the factors that needed to occur in just the right particular order, that our Universe must have been designed specifically to give rise to us. The claim that's often made isn't merely that Earth is unlikely it's that our planet, with the confluence of circumstances that gave rise to us, is statistically impossible, even given all the stars and galaxies in the Universe.

credit: Mars Spirit Rover, NASA/JPL/Cornell. The terrain of, for example, Mars, is woefully inhospitable to life as we recognize it.

What is the point of existence