Capitol Hill Blue Forums Thread Like Summary - Life On Other Planets

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I have reached a reasonable scientific conclusion. First of all, I am ignoring all religious arguments, and humanity's claim to exceptionalism. All I can claim for us is that we have a real talent for screwing, which is fine for entertainment, but not important to the topic. It all comes down to The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Natural Selection. We have many many proofs that both of these are universal, in the sense that they apply anywhere in the universe.

So how do they interact? Every "decision" made by evolution is a case of the most efficient route of the Second Law "winning". Animal varieties that get out-competed for food die out. A species being successful depends on it's utilization of energy sources. In the big picture, life is just the most efficient means of entropy moving concentrated energy to more disbursed energy. And that "energy" may not be in the form of physical energy, but organization versus disorganization. For example, a pool of concentrated sugar water getting invaded by yeast that can use the sugar. The end result is less concentrated sugar water. High organization, high energy inevitably moving to a less concentrated state. Basic Second Law physics. And all powered by nuclear fusion in the stars.

There are no "lucky accidents" in evolution. It is instead inevitable, just because The Second Law drives it. So my conclusion: There is life everywhere in the universe where it is possible. It may be primitive in some places by our standards. It may not be primitive at all in others. But it will happen, because it has to happen given enough time. And Earth is relatively young by the universe's standards.

The real disappointment is the realization that absent some miracle quirk of physics beyond our ken, the likelihood we could ever travel to and reach another civilization is near zero.
I suspect that most if not all civilizations everywhere in the Universe die out before they ever get a chance at interstellar travel.
There very well may have been millions of civilizations more advanced than ours in existence millions of years ago, and they may very well have winked out for a million possible reasons. I bet all of them harbor or harbored dreams of arriving elsewhere in the Universe and meeting another race of beings on another planet.

I remain more than a bit skeptical of visitors from another planet, but I doubt we're alone or even remotely unique, or even special.
We are lake trout and we may never ever interact with a single starfish in millions of generations, but the evidence for the possible existence of starfish
is provable.

We need to concern ourselves more with our own survival as a species before we concern ourselves overmuch about life on other planets. The likeliest scenario I can imagine is an interstellar traveler stopping in someday and finding that civilization had once existed here, proving to them that there is life on other planets.