The recent SETIcon II conference in Santa Clara, CA had optimistic news for those hoping that there's life on other planets. In recent years, thousands of planets have been discovered by NASA's Kepler Project, and many of them show signs of containing water, considered essential for the development of life. But just because conditions are capable of supporting life doesn't mean they're capable of originating life. What does it take to get biology started? Is it enough just to have the right chemical elements on hand? Will such chemicals, floating in water, automatically combine to produce higher and higher levels of organized complexity and ultimately result in conscious living creatures? That seems a bit improbable, even leaving aside the question of how consciousness can arise from nonliving atoms, unless there's an invisible mind, or spirit, that guides this process of organizing atoms into highly complex, self replicating sentient beings and imparts a bit of its own spirit to them. If such a spirit exists, then life could occur almost anywhere the basic elements are present, and we shouldn't be surprised to find it. But if not, it would take an extraordinary set of random accidents and coincidences for life to start anywhere, and we would expect it to be extremely rare in the universe.
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