Once life gets started, regardless of the underlying biochemistry,
we can expect that the basic principles of evolution will hold.
And as we'll talk about in the next lecture, we can take our ideas about
evolution and apply them without knowing the underlying biochemical processes.
So when we think about life on other planets,
we can think about evolution happening.
Regardless of understanding the biochemistry, but
to get at this really fundamental question of is there life elsewhere,
it's very hard at this stage forr us to answer that.
Yet from first principles, we don't know enough about the origin of life and
the probability of life arising to know how often it will occur.