Still, with only one example, its hard to draw any conclusions, and we should be very suspicious of any we do draw.

And yet, life is extremely tenacious and has managed to colonize almost every environment on the planet. There are bacteria in the rock miles down in the earth’s crust, buried deep in Antarctic ice and living in hot springs and inside tanks of jet fuel.

Matter somehow manages to assemble itself into structures of great complexity that manipulate its environment, extract energy from it, and make copies of itself that do the same thing. Not only that, those “structures” are constantly evolving in order to do what they do even better.

Yeah, there’s a whole lot going on we still don’t understand. But what we do know is you don’t need magic for any of it to happen. The universe is programmed for life, just like its programmed for electricity and gravity.

Growing up on Earth is a very complicated business.

Microbial, yes. Advanced take time and a lot of luck.

OK, even if its extremely unlikely, maybe earth got lucky and developed single cell organisms early in its history. Maybe its extremely unlikely for such an event to take place anywhere else. Now, we know microbial life is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for multicellular life. We know this because metazoans arose relatively late in earth’s history, which suggests it is the bottleneck to the process.

So this new research claims that not only is multicellular life rare, but so is microbial life. And yet, earth has both, and sentient beings as well. Surely this is a miracle. We are special, surely the hand of god has put us here, and the rest of the universe is barren. We couldn’t have arisen as a result of random natural processes, because we are unique. Astronomy, chemistry and evolution alone couldn’t have put us here. Yeah, right. I can see where this is heading.

This sounds like vitalism, Creationism and Intelligent Design bullshit to me, disguised as science. I don’t believe a word of it. The Monte Carlo approach outlined here is contradicted by the one data point we do have–that life arose on earth almost immediately, and it arose in a typical proto-stellar environment rich with the chemical precursors and environmental conditions which favor life.

It stretches credulity that one of the very few planets capable of life at all then, after three billion years, suddenly made the leap to complex organisms, then a sentient species, without some form of divine intervention. A more realistic model is that, statistically, you need LOTS of microbial life sites to arise in order to have any chance at all of even one pre-Cambrian explosion like ours to occur. And of course, you need lots of THOSE to get even one civilization.

I think intelligent life is extremely rare, perhaps we are the only example currently existing in our Galaxy. Multicellular life is widespread, but not common, there may be only a handful of planets in the Galaxy at any one time with metazoans creeping, swimming or flying about, or rooted to, its surface. I can’t prove this, of course, I am making assumptions here that may be mistaken, but so is our Japanese astrophysicist.

As for microbial life, I think the universe is crawling with it.