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Podcast: SETI Live
Episode: Is Intelligent Life Easy? Human-Like Life Probably Evolves "Right on Time"
Description: ​A recent study proposes a new model for the evolution of intelligent life, which challenges the long-standing "hard steps" theory that the emergence of intelligent life is an exceedingly rare event due to a series of improbable evolutionary milestones. A team led by postdoctoral researcher Dan Mills from the University of Munich suggests that the development of intelligent life is a natural outcome of planetary evolution. They argue that Earth's environment underwent sequential "windows of habitability," periods when conditions became favorable for complex life to emerge. (Past Drake Award winner Jason Wright is a co-author on the study.) The st...