However, earlier today we learnt on one of the breakfast television programmes that for Professor Andrei Finkelstein, of Russia’s Applied Astronomy Institute, normal rules of academic rigour don't appear to apply. He's observed that since we didn’t know of any exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) at all twenty years ago, and have now found more than 500 of them, the chances are that stars without any planets are the exception not the rule. This "logic" has led him to conclude that "earthlike" planets (i.e. smallish, rocky and orbiting well-behaved stars at a reasonable distance) are probably extremely common in the universe and therefore life must be everywhere: leading to either an "inevitable" contact with an alien civilisation or the discovery of alien microbes, at the very least, within the next 20 years.
Quite why Pr Finkelstein has concluded that the possible existence of small rocky planets with water-friendly surface temperatures etc means that "the genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms", wasn't revealed, nor were any tips regarding the solving of science's greatest mysteries:
- how, or where did life begin on Earth (although we have some idea as to the when?
- has biogenesis happened once, twice, many times, and is it still going on today?
- does the existence of one biosphere preclude the emergence of another one?
In short, while our knowledge of the stars and planets grows daily, what we actually know about life, how it comes about, or even what it really is hasn't moved on very much from the dark age superstitions that a Sky Fairy did it.
The idea that Earth is unique in some way might well fit in with these primitive beliefs, and is a yet-to-be-discounted possibility, but statements of certainty about alien life are currently nothing more than wishful thinking and need to be filed in the pseudoscience box until ET turns up and says that his dad sent him!
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