"Unless it happens to shoot at you with a ray gun, life you encounter off of Earth will not necessarily have the same biochemistry as us," said Steven Benner with the Florida-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. "You would not it necessarily be able to be recognize it as life." Davies recalled that when he was attending school in the 1960s, the prevailing view was that life is "statistically improbable, a freak accident, a chemical quirk. It happened once in the observable universe, and we are it." In the last few decades, however, the pendulum has swung the other way. "It is now quite fashionable to say that the universe is teeming with life, but the scientific facts haven't changed very much," Davies said. "We're still completely ignorant about whether life pretty much automatically and naturally arises in Earth-like conditions, or whether it is just a fluke." Related Links: |
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