We’re all alone: Oxford study says chance of intelligent life elsewhere very low - The Times of Israel

In the paper, scientists from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, theorize that as life evolved on earth, in many cases it depended on a series of unlikely “revolutionary transitions.” Given how late intelligent life evolved on this planet, the chances of similar developments happening on other planets, before they are no longer able to sustain life, were highly unlikely, they said.

“It took approximately 4.5 billion years for a series of evolutionary transitions resulting in intelligent life to unfold on Earth,” they wrote in the paper published last month.

“Together with the dispersed timing of key evolutionary transitions and plausible priors, one can conclude that the expected transition times likely exceed the lifetime of Earth, perhaps by many orders of magnitude,” the wrote.

“In turn, this suggests that intelligent life is likely to be exceptionally rare.”.

The paper points to the fact that it took more than a billion years for life to advance from prokaryotic (single-cell organisms) to eukaryotes (organisms with a nucleus) means that such a step is highly unlikely.

A Times of Israel Community gift membership entitles your recipient to one full year of membership benefits, at a special, discounted price.