According to today’s best estimates, the universe is about 13.73 billion years old and the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old.
You don’t think an extra 9.19 billion years, in which life could have developed elsewhere in the universe, is significant?
[Crush T Velour] Actually, it is worse than that. Evolutionary Biology states that ALL life on Earth evolved from a single ancestor. This is argued for very compelling reasons. Yet, even though Earth is self-evidently hospitable to Life, and even though trillions of wet, protein-filled bags of lifeforms offer more environments for unique Life to originally occur, it has only happened once in 3.5 billion years (roughly one quarter the age of the Universe). Moving Life's origin to another planet does not solve the problem of its incidence here.
[joseph20] According to today’s best estimates, the universe is about 13.73 billion years old and the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. You don’t think an extra 9.19 billion years, in which life could have developed elsewhere in the universe, is significant?
Joseph20,
Earth is self-evidently hospitable to Life. There are long-thriving life-cycles from the stratosphere to miles below the ground to within volcanos at the bottom of the ocean forever beyond the reach of sunlight and filling all the space between. And, consequently, for the last 3.5 billion years Earth has been covered by mobile and immobile bags of water-filled protein materials (ie. life-forms and their cells) in billions of combinations and environments.
I'm curious what conditions you imagine elsewhere that were more likely to have achieved results that have not been duplicated on Earth for 4.5 billion years. We've been conducting a rigorous 3.5 billion year experiment here, failing to duplicate something that began thriving on this planet as soon as it could survive here at all and failing to originate Life from unliving elements by chance or deliberately.
Once in 3.5 billion years under incredibly ideal circumstances. If I were to come up with a fasifiable definition of a miracle, that would be a good one.
One other thing....
Since life on Earth is based on the element carbon and carbon is thought to only be naturally formed within stars, the hypothetically “seeded” life form could only have originally occured after star supernova’ed and reformed into a star system with a hospitable planet. Then it had to travel to Earth. That surely cuts a nasty chunk out of the remaining 9.5 billion years.