/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15675342
This is more or less what I think. It took 3 billion years for complex eukaryotic cells to emerge and then 600 million more for the cambrian explosion where complex life really occured.

My bet is that simple "replicators" if you will -not even proper microbes- that are still working out things like homeostasis are probably relatively common. Common enough that we could likely eventually find a half dozen examples in our solar system alone. But, anything more complex is vanishingly rare. It took 3.4 billion years or about 1/3 the age of the universe to get to technological life.

People also forget that there are galactic habitable zones (things like frequent gamma ray bursts could preclude advanced life) and elliptical galaxies (~12%) of them are kind of unlikely to form rocky planets due to their differences in star populations and metallicity. Granted this is based off of what we know of our biology and technology.

There could be weird biochemistry replicators in the clouds of venus, in the Martian soil, or in the ethane seas of Titan. But, my point in all this rambling is that "complex cells probably really rare, simple cell-like structures probably decently common"