With the publication of “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe,” Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee explained why microbial life may be ubiquitous in the universe, but ...

Planet Earth has been around for the past 4.5 billion years or so: about the last third of the Universe's history. Through a combination of geology and paleontology, we can trace the existence of ...

Special – but not unique. In 2000, Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee argued in Rare Earth that intelligent life on Earth relied on so many unlikely accidents that we are probably alone in the universe.

Life is incredibly complicated, but for most of Earth’s history it was much simpler. Is it possible the Universe is full of ...

Comment and Life Why complex life could prove remarkably common in the universe. 20 December 2017 ... Do we live on a rare earth, ...

A new study suggests that complex alien life -- the sort of life we could one day meet and potentially communicate with -- might be present on far fewer worlds than previously thought, due to the ...

But one thing is almost certain: Life in our universe is extremely rare. I have already explained that life is rare in space—only a small fraction of matter exists in living form.

An abundance of life: Plant-covered land is red in this combined visible light/infrared view of Earth from the Messenger spacecraft. In our new book, The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds ...

The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, Jan Brueghel the Elder.. In a new paper published in the journal Life, William Bains and I make the case that complex, macroscopic life should be common ...

Caleb Scharf is director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center and author of several books, including The Copernicus Complex (2014) and The Zoomable Universe (2017). He wrote the Life, Unbounded ...