If life can make it here, it can make it anywhere.

PositionEvolution

If the origin of life is common on other worlds, the universe should be a cosmic zoo full of complex multicellular organisms. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist from Washington State University, Pullman, uses the evolution of Earth life as a model to predict what humans might find living on distant planets and moons. He reports his findings in a paper published in the journal Life.

The results of his work, conducted in collaboration with William Bains, a biochemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., show that once life originates, the evolution of organisms functionally similar to plants or animals on Earth will follow naturally given enough time and a suitable environment.

"If the origin of life can occur rather easily, a percentage of organisms on other worlds will reach higher levels of animal- or plant-like complexity," says Schulze-Makuch. "On the other hand, if the origin of life is a rare event, then chances are we live in a rather empty universe."

There are physical and chemical limits to how life can evolve, and scientists have determined that many of those conditions have been met on Earth. Therefore, the route Earthly lifeforms took from simple, single-celled organisms to successively more complex entities can give hints of how life might play out elsewhere in the cosmos.

In their study, Schulze-Makuch and Bains first identified the key...

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