<kook mode> http://rt.com/news/269182-ceres-dwarf-images-peak Looks like the ancient astronauts who built the pyramids practiced their art on Ceres first, eh? The only question is whether they were ancient human astronauts from Atlantis or aliens who came to our system and taught humankind to be civilised! </kook mode>
Uncle Ferd says it ain't been hit by as many comets an' meteors... New Clues as to Why Dwarf Planet Ceres Has Few Craters July 26, 2016 - When the Dawn spacecraft reached the dwarf planet Ceres in March of 2015 researchers were baffled by the lack of large impact craters, but new research may provide some answers.
I'm 99.999999% sure that life exists somewhere else in the universe. However, I'm nowhere near that probability concerning "intelligent" life but the odds are in its favor.
I'm sure that origin points of life are more commonly primitive because they all start out primitive and not all of them get as far as we have. Had our sun been of the more short-lived variety, the world would have ended before we got past bacteria. Outside of whatever colonization intelligent civilizations have done, we're going to be more likely to find bacteria than jellyfish, more likely to find jellyfish than dinosaurs, and more likely to find dinosaurs than intelligent life. But with enough time, intelligent life is almost certain to occur because it is the ultimate survival strategy that is more reliable than any other strategy in the end. The bacterial survival model is still more reliable than what we've achieved, but that would change if we mastered interstellar travel and nanotechnology. I'm sure there are at least millions of origins of life out there, and at least thousands of civilizations. But the universe is a very big place so who knows if we'll ever meet them.
The Earth is estimated to be over 4.5 billion years old. The time span is staggering to the point that humans can't hope to truly comprehend the numbers. For all we know, a hundred thousand or more civilizations in various forms existed HERE ON EARTH and were destroyed over time without a trace. So I'm keeping my mind open to the possibility that life exists elsewhere or did exist at some point.
I suppose they do if land-dwelling aliens have ever existed which have at some point gotten into stone construction. A pyramid or ziggurat is the way to make a stone construction very tall.
