Fenrir.Sathicus said: »
Being pedantic because I actually agree with you, but being correct is important. We have a sample size of 1 for locations where life exists in the universe.
The statics are mind blowing on this though, the sheer size and diversity guarantee's that "Earth Event" has happened or will happen a few million times. And that's just restricting it to just "Earth" conditions, the moment you open up the possibility for exotic chemistry, tidal fricting heating and other non-Earth-normal situations then it becomes impossible for life not to be everywhere. It's virtually guaranteed that microbiological life has existed on Mars at some point in time, likely around the same time it started on earth 3+ billion years ago. Mar's just had it's atmosphere zapped away and surface bombarded with high energy solar radiation which ended any evolution that would of taken place.
It just won't be life we recognize.
Brings up a point I like to make with people about cosmic events. The concept of time is radically different then what us humans are used to. Our entire "civilization" has been around what, maybe 10,000 years if we stretch it? We as a species have been around maybe 60,000 years, protohumans since 100,000 years. To us that seems like such a huge amount of time but in a cosmic sense that's merely a rounding error. Cosmic events take place in millions if not billions of solar years time scales. Universe is nearly 14 billion solar years old at best estimate with there being 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe alone (meaning 5~10x more actually exist). Each of those galaxies has tens of billions of star systems. The sheer number of stars in the universe is a number so massive that it's beyond human comprehension.
Makes a human feel very small and insignificant in the grand ordering of things.