“Exoplanet statistics tell us all stars are orbited by some kind of planetary systems. The planets in the Alpha Centauri system are about a billion years older than the Sun and the Earth. Thus, if life has emerged on an Earth-like planet in the Alpha Centauri system, that life has had about a billion years longer to evolve than life on Earth,” wrote Australia National University astrobiologist and cosmologist, Charley Lineweaver, co-author of a new study about the sun-like stars closest to us, the α Centauri A/B binary, in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “To put that in perspective, about a billion years ago, our ancestors were amoeba-like creatures fond of engulfing paramecium-like creatures. However, we have very few reliable ideas about how life evolves in general.”
“In fact I don’t even think we know what life is,” Lineweaver notes in his reply. “Thus, our modeling of the Earth-like planets in the Alpha Centauri system can tell much about the elemental composition of those planets and how that composition is different from Earth’s. But, making predictions about life there and its evolution will require much more data”
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