Author: Daniel Brady Mills, Postdoctoral Fellow in Geomicrobiology, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled history of life and our planet, we propose that the coevolution of life and Earth’s surface environment may have unfolded in a way that makes the evolutionary origin of humanlike intelligence a more foreseeable or expected outcome than generally thought. The hard-steps model Some of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century famously dismissed the prospect of humanlike intelligence beyond Earth. This view, firmly rooted in biology, independently gained…