[jcims]

I'm fairly confident we'll eventually find that our form of life is the result of intentional or unintentional colonization of Earth.

If you look at how quickly life began after the oceans settled out, then look at precisely how complex even the most primitive forms of life are (in terms of likelihood of stochastic construction to the point of sophistication to support evolutionary mechanisms) it seems incredibly unlikely that we originated here.

[Osiris]

This is an interesting idea. Look at how religion explains the origin of life: A lifeform not from this planet, far more advanced than us, gave "the breath of life", and calls us their "children".

The vastness of this universe leads me to believe that it's impossible to dismiss the idea that there is an intelligence/lifeform sufficiently advanced as to appear to be a God to us.

[jcims]

Totally agree. Joscha Bach laid out a few interesting ideas around this at the end of a podcast.

If you have a few minutes start here for a broader context (starts of wholly unrelated but with some great concepts):

https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM?t=10084

If not, he drills into it here:

https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM?t=10400

[psychoslave]

That doesn't explain where the said intelligence /lifeform would come from itself, so what the point of such a theory?

[sliken]

I read a short story that explained the explosion of life on earth during a very short period on some alien that didn't follow protocol and dumped some poop.

[marta_morena_28]

Possible, but far reaching. There are other explanations:

* We are a computer simulation (hence there is no colonization, we are in an experiment)

* There are like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 habitable planets in the universe. Just because something is "extremely unlikely" doesn't mean that it didn't happen to us. I.e. whomever this happened to, would ask himself that question. We may just be the ones it happened to.

Also: Why would they settle species from millions of years in their own past. If they wanted to colonize, they could start with their own life-forms.

Could be several things as well:

* We are a genesis project and they will simply come back later and settle in what we left behind (i.e. they let the ecosystem build for a few million years before trying out this settlement)

* They don't want to create competitors

* We are a population bomb, i.e. they just sent out billions of probes trying to populate any given habitable planet, and they couldn't just spawn themselves there and instead had to start from somewhere where a sustainable ecosystem would derive from

[35fbe7d3d5b9]

> * We are a genesis project and they will simply come back later and settle in what we left behind (i.e. they let the ecosystem build for a few million years before trying out this settlement)

Depressing fiction idea: our progenitors return, look at what we've done with the world, shake their heads and leave us to suffer.

[nn3]

Keep in mind that molecular evolution happens at a massive parallel scale. If there's some simple recipe for basic evolving life it is very unlikely that is not being hit in a few million years by a large number of molecules and then primitive cells.

And it's unlikely that there is only a single recipe. Most likely there are many (just on Earth all the others died out)