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The notion that life is favored because it accelerates global evolution toward increased entropy predates, I think, Prigogine. But it doesn't resolve the question of whether life, especially intelligent life, actually exists elsewhere. On Earth the vast majority of tornados only occur in a narrow swath of land because while they're immensely efficient at dissipating energy there are several prerequisites required for them to emerge. And there are many other simpler dissipation mechanisms that end up narrowing the odds of configurations amenable to tornado formation. Moreover, these systems could easily overshoot and snuff themselves out; settling into a complex (as opposed to static or chaotic) configuration might be favored in some sense but still be incredibly rare to become established. The fact we see so many of them on Earth might just be a reflection of the anthropic principle. That is, there's a correlation between our existence and all the other complex systems surrounding us, biologic, geologic, etc. The observable universe isn't infinite, and the more we learn about all the chance mechanisms that coincided to result in Earth, let alone the emergence of Earth life, the easier it is to believe that at this moment in the observable universe we might very well be alone. Maybe we aren't, but "the universe is big" simply doesn't cut it, not even when positing unimaginable biologies. It's doesn't take that many combined odds to conceivably end up with a number for the probability of life that is comparable in [inverse] magnitude to the size of our observable universe in stars, planets, or even atoms. If we live in an infinite universe, then it's a stronger argument, though it wouldn't necessarily follow that life definitely must exist elsewhere even if beyond observability. |