Given how life started on earth almost immediately after it cooled down it is fairly widely accepted that there’s life out there. What level of complexity is up for debate. Also, if the universe is infinite and the laws of physics are the same everywhere, there is a 100% chance that there is an infinite number of exact replicas of earth and its history out there.
It’s not “fairly widely accepted” because there’s literally no evidence for it. Anything can happen once. Something happening once is not evidence of how common it is. For that, you need to count how often it happens. We have only the vaguest ideas about how common certain requirements are, and less information about potential hurdles.
That’s the point of the Fermi Paradox: if the Drake Equation estimates are right, we should see life everywhere in the universe. The fact that we see no life indicates that our assumptions are wrong.
Given how life started on earth almost immediately after it cooled down it is fairly widely accepted that there’s life out there. What level of complexity is up for debate. Also, if the universe is infinite and the laws of physics are the same everywhere, there is a 100% chance that there is an infinite number of exact replicas of earth and its history out there.
It’s not “fairly widely accepted” because there’s literally no evidence for it. Anything can happen once. Something happening once is not evidence of how common it is. For that, you need to count how often it happens. We have only the vaguest ideas about how common certain requirements are, and less information about potential hurdles.
That’s the point of the Fermi Paradox: if the Drake Equation estimates are right, we should see life everywhere in the universe. The fact that we see no life indicates that our assumptions are wrong.