I’ve had a hypothesis ever since studying biology and things like complexity and emergence years ago: We will find life almost everywhere there is an energy gr

I’ve had a hypothesis ever since studying biology and things like complexity and emergence years ago: We will find life almost everywhere there is an energy gradient, a sufficiently rich substrate, and phase transition boundaries. Life is just a thing that forms in such places. In our solar system that is Venus, Earth (of course), Mars, Titan (I predict very slow metabolism cryogenic life with a hydrocarbon solvent), and subsurface oceans like Europa if they have a heat source that creates phase boundaries and energy gradients. It will be mostly simple life though. What we won’t find everywhere is complex life. That took billions of years on Earth. It probably takes a very stable very rich large scale ecosystem with a huge energy flux to cook things like complex multicellularity and cognition, and there are reasons to believe Earth is a rare sort of environment.