Study suggests intelligent life may be more common than previously thought

A new study challenges the belief that humanlike intelligence is extremely rare in the universe. It suggests that the evolution of life on Earth and its environment may have unfolded in a way that makes such intelligence more likely than previously thought. Historically, scientists believed that the emergence of humanlike life depended on rare, hard evolutionary steps. However, the study argues that environmental changes on Earth over billions of years created conditions that allowed for the eventual development of intelligent life. Researchers propose that collaboration across various scientific fields could help determine how often these evolutionary steps occurred and assess the likelihood of intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe.