I give two examples as to why intelligent life may not actually exist, though I admit that for me, or even for a physicist who devoted his or her entire life to researching and studying the universe, it's shocking to claim that completely no life exists elsewhere.
Keeping that in mind, I'd just like to consider conditions elsewhere in the known universe. You really only need to look at our own solar system or the Earth at certain periods in its own history to appreciate that most places are much worse and much less suitable for life than our mild, watery globe.
So far, space scientists have discovered about seventy planets outside the solar. But it appears that if you wish to have a planet suitable for life, you just have to be very lucky, and the more advanced the life is, the luckier you'll have to be. I'm by no means a space observer, but I can recognize some particularly fortunate breaks we've had on the Earth. For example:
We are, to a degree, at the right distance from the perfect type of star, the one that is big enough to radiate a huge amount of energy, but not so big as to bum itself out quickly. Had our sun been ten times as huge, it would have burnt out completely after only ten million years, instead of ten billion and surely we would not exist. Too near, everything on the Earth would have boiled and withered away; any further, everything would have frozen over.
The universe is a surprising place, and our existence within it is a wonder. If a long and unimaginably complex sequence of events dating back 4.6 billion years or so hadn't happened in a particular manner at a particular time --if, to take just one example, the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out by a meteor(流星)--we might still be a few centimeters long, with whisker(胡须) and a tail, and you'll be reading this in a cave somewhere.
小题1:What's the best title for this passage?
A．No Life Exists out of the Earth
B．Seventy Planets Discovered
C．A Place Full of Wonders
D．Perfect Conditions for Life小题2:What makes the Earth more suitable for life than other planets in the solar system?
A．The Earth is the only planet that can receive energy from the sun.
B．The sun is at the right distance from us and in proper size.
C．The distance between the planets was neither too long nor too near.
D．The dinosaurs were no longer a threat to the Earth.小题3:What does the underlined phrase "withered away" in the 4th paragraph mean?
A．Exploded.
B．Expanded.
C．Floated away.
D．Dried and died.小题4:Where does the text probably come from?
A．A history book.
B．A magazine.
C．A science fiction.
D．A famous novel.