https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/exo-life.html
(Alien life). I used to argue with a prominent YEC about exoplanets - the existence of planets orbiting other stars. He used to try and insist that they could not exist, and in his weird anti-Copernican egocentric mentality, we must be unique because we are special, because God created the world just for us. He has gone quiet about that now, with at the time of writing this, October 2023, well over 5,000 exoplanets having been observed. It is expected that a huge number more actually exist, together with the possibility of life in the oceans under the ice of the moons of gas giants.
But a question still comes up,
"Are we not unique in our place in the cosmos, because life has not been detected anywhere else? Doesn't this argue for an unnatural, magical origin of life on earth?"
This is an example of dangerously risky theology, a God-of-the-gaps argument, because we may be on the verge of detecting exolife on exoplanets by examining the composition of their atmospheres using the JWST for evidence of gases that could only be produced by biological activity, such as the free oxygen we all enjoy here on earth. And a new telescope is envisaged for this, https://www.livescience.com/space/exoplanets/the-oldest-continents-in-the-milky-way-may-be-5-billion-years-older-than-earths
By the way, it was poor Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) who seems to be the one who first proposed the idea that the stars were suns with planets that could harbour life. He was badly treated (understatement) by the Church. See my page that I produced after coming across his monument in Rome.
https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/giordano-bruno.html
What about the "Where are they" question? This is the famous Fermi paradox. Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist who posed the question, "If intelligent technologically advanced races exist in the universe, why haven't they called or visited? Why do we have no evidence for them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi
Some answers have been proposed.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Perhaps life is not rare in the universe, but intelligent, technology-using life is very rare.
Let's wait and see.
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