by ooli

As far back as the sixteenth century, Italian philosopher and Dominican friar Giordano Bruno argued that the stars above us were in fact stars surrounded by their own system of planets and they too could be presumed to be inhabited (for why would God go to all the bother to create a world, only to leave it empty?) — a theological position known as “cosmic pluralism.” This extension of the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system that toppled humanity’s place at the center of the universe was of course a heresy.

Despite what we think, Everyone always assumed we were not alone... May be thinking we are, is the most interesting approach

Compared to the universe’s 13.8-billion-year-old life span so far, 4 billion years for things to kick off hints at how unlikely this may be.

it took 2 billion years between the first emergence of bacterial and archaean life and eukaryotic life (cells with true nuclei), and another billion again before eukaryotes got friendly enough to bunch up into multicellular life.