Reply #6: It's not the sun that's the issue [View All]

It's the planet. Earth has a number of nice features that make it habitable by carbon and water-based life forms, like being solid (unlike Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune), in a zone where liquid water is common (unlike Europa which is covered in ice), having enough surface water to support life (unlike Io), having a liquid iron core and hence a magnetic field to shield the inhabitants from a lot of EM radiation (unlike Mars) and not having undergone a runaway greenhouse effect (unlike Venus where the surface temperature would melt lead and surface "air" pressure would crush you like a bug). There are a lot of variables and we don't have enough data to say where life can and cannot form. We only know of one inhabited planetary body. Considering that there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, it doesn't seem reasonable to assume ours is the only plant to harbor life. On the other hand, we know from our own solar system that life isn't all that common.