Thank you, Jill. An excellent article.
A few notable excerpts (supporting, to bland's mind, the thesis that life is not simply the result of blind, random chance. Otherwise it should have disappeared, long before now, equally as randomly. Bland feels, as you know, that something else is at work that we simply do not yet understand):
"We're learning all the time that life, in some form or other, is incredibly resilient, albeit fluid -- episodically morphing into new and better adapted forms rather than succumbing fragilely to the slightest little stress," says UC Berkeley geologist Paul Renne.
"We have no idea whether the origin of life was a gigantic chemical fluke, unique in the universe, or an expected result of inherently bio-friendly laws," Davies says. "Given this uncertainty on the likelihood of life emerging, it is clearly more plausible in the current state of our knowledge to conjecture that life may have survived multiple impacts by a lifeboat mechanism, or other refuge, rather than re-emerging from scratch in each window of opportunity."
The growing view of life's tenacity means life itself may have grown, and still be growing, in more places than scientists previously thought |
