From an interview with Sir Martin Rees, former Astronomer Royal:
Excerpt…
It really is easier to understand a star than to understand the simplest of the organisms, than to understand an insect or a frog. And that’s because what makes it hard to understand is the layers of structures inside them — the complexities, which, of course are very great indeed.
Within the case of a star, everything is so hot that there is not complex chemistry, it’s all broken down into simple atomic gas which is easy to understand. And, by extension, the early universe — the Big Bang — which is even hotter than the star, may also be more amenable to our understanding than life.
So, it’s not presumptuous to me that we could learn something about the universe or stars, because what makes things hard to understand is not size, but complexity. But this, incidentally, also leads — when we get to something that’s on the interface between astronomy and biology — like the origin of life — then, that is a much more difficult question.
So, although we can now say fairly confidently that there are many Earth-like planets around other stars, whether life will evolve on those stars, given the right environment, like the young Earth, is a question that I don’t think we can answer confidently, because that’s a biological question.
So, I think it will be a long time before we have any clear betting on whether there is simple life or intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But I still think it’s important to search for it.
Source: https://medium.com/@jonathan.kochmer/interview-w-sir-martin-rees-astronomer-royal-of-england-part-2-of-3-from-otterarchives-24fb29c5e887
Information is the new physics. And the highest form of information is love.
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