Definitely life out there in the universe somewhere, maybe trillions of planets with it... in fact there could well be millions or billions of intelligent civilizations out there with
billions of years of a head start on us. Think about that... we're like undeveloped pond scum to them. They may have moved on to become pure energy beings in the ultraverse, traveling between galaxies and universes at will in the "dark energy" threads winding through everything, and left us behind as a childish side show, a child's forgotten ant farm. Maybe they're "god"? Reaching in occasionally to fuck shit up just for fun but mostly having no interest.
Read "
The Janitor on Mars" by Martin Amis for a smart and cynical sci-fi story to end all sci-fi stories.
There are ~200 billion stars in the Milky Way, a typical galaxy, and in turn there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe that we can (sorta) see. The math is insane. Life may well be common as dirt.
In fact there are a lot of scientists now that think a water-based planet (which is a limiter -- can't be Venus or Mars, too far in or out from your star) with a rich chemical soup that includes carbon will inevitably spark "life" which is just self-replicating chemical reactions in bubbles, basically. Life on earth most likely started around deep ocean volcanic vents "eating" hydrogen sulfide, and much later some of it found some surface waters and developed sun-dependent chemistry. And then other mutations developed to focus on parasitizing the efforts of the primary producers. E.g. the entire animal kingdom. Fungi too.
Astronomical odds are no big deal with you have astronomical numbers to play with -- of star systems (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or more) and of years for shit to happen in a chemical soup, many thousands of millions of years. Life took almost 4 billion years on earth to go from simplest bacteria to anything macroscopic with teeth or shells that would preserve nicely in sediments, which happened only 550 million years ago. We were segmented worms with notochord nervous systems along our back at that point.
Teeth came before bones in vertebrates. Bones spread back from teeth but teeth were the source. Offense before defense. There's some of Nature's wisdom for you...
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That is also true. Fuck the roundheads.