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We have no population of life supporting worlds to compare to, but we could take the timeline of events on our own planet as a way to estimate their probability
by dougmwne 4y ago
We have no population of life supporting worlds to compare to, but we could take the timeline of events on our own planet as a way to estimate their probability. Each year something doesn’t happen makes it all the more rare of an event.
As far as we can tell, DNA and single celled life evolved almost as soon as the planet cooled down enough for liquid water. There may have been a short gap of a lifeless water world, but it does appear to be quite short.
Complex multicellular life seems to be extremely rare considering that the Cambrian explosion took billions of years to kick off. Once it got going it moved very fast filling our world with an incredible diversity of life.
Intelligence seems somewhat common considering that it exists in birds, mammals and octopi, something that is probably inevitable once you have multicellular organisms. Human level intelligence might be a bit rare, but probably not particularly. And once you have humans, the race to the stars seems inevitable.
So of all of this, the Cambrian seems mostly likely to be the great filter unless intelligence naturally causes its own extinction in short order.