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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Futurity" data-source="post: 7766126" data-attributes="member: 10738">Well, it's worth noting that Earth had meaningful life on it for 500 million years before it had sentient life that could ask this sort of question (and I believe it took 3 billion years to get to that point in total!) So any consideration of life on other planets has from the one model at hand the following points to consider:1. Life on a world like ours can easily take 500 million years to go from early bacteria to sentient civilization.2. We had the potential for sentience only within the last 2.5 million years, basic sapient behavior with language within the last 200,000 years or so, and the ability to conduct civilization within the last 10-15 thousand years; and that only reached fruition in a manner allowing us to study the sky meaningfully for other signs of life within the last century. 3. We can't know whether we are special in the universe, but we can state that we are the only representative sample we have to study. As such, it's not unreasonable to assume that the length of time it took life on Earth and eventual sentient civilization to develop wouldn't take at least as long on other planets of the same composition/placement in the Goldilocks zone of other star systems. 4. We can say with certainty that assuming the circumstances are right, and the potential for life is realized, it will happen at different times in different systems. The question then becomes: how many of these circumstances happened long before us, and how many long after us, or around the same time? How many are happening right now, but are millions or billions of light years away, impossible for us to detect or interact with? I think the answer to whether we are special or not boils down, at least for now, to the notion that we can consider ourselves special in the sense that we are a "sample of one," and the only sample we have unless something interesting rears its head in the frozen oceans of Enceladus or elsewhere. But we are by all probabilities not "special" in the sense that there is a vanishinghly small likelihood that our circumstances have not repeated to some degree elsewhere in the universe, probably many times.....but unfortunately not nearby, or necessarily in the same timeframe we have developed.</blockquote>

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