I don’t want to foolishly press the issue of Earthlings likely being merely one instance of intelligent life in our galaxy, but “Kepler’s planet survey indicates that...there should be one billion Earth-sized worlds in the Milky Way galaxy at present, a good portion of them presumed to be rocky” [my emphasis], citation. Evidently, too, stars create organic molecules; organic chemistry results during solar system formation. The primal ingredients for life are likely everywhere around any stellar system.

Also, realize that further understanding of Our origin of life just corroborates that life begins easily. Recently, scientists reported that life on Earth evidently began relatively immediately after Earth’s formation: Life began 300 million years earlier than previously prospected. So, not only was life on Earth completely destroyed at least three times, then began again. Life began in the first place very easily. Life begins easily. Life thrives easily. Older planets in the “water window” are likely to be alive.

Good reason for absolutizing Mother Nature is fading fast. Intelligibility is ever evolving (anthropic universe or not). Increasingly, we must ask (prospecting that They are): How are We to regard the Absolute Other?

For starters: By appreciating our planetarity as such; and the ontogenic “nature” of things. Planetarity is the horizon of humanity; ontogeny, the mirrorwindow of understanding. (Mathematical physics is something else—How?)

Earthly regionality is not all that is bio-relevant anymore for a species endlessly evolving new ways of organizing its relativity for the sake of wholly flourishing (and shepherding its planetarity—even relative to galactic regioning)—a species thereby evolving (enacting the evolving of) Its intelligibility (also re: that “How”).

Is healthy high intelligence intrinsically appreciative (given high self-formation) such that ethical intelligibility ultimately belongs to intelligibility as such? (Does the question seem eccentrically confused? O, please: Outgrow Kantism.) Is high intelligibility intrinsically apprecative? Can there be interstellar Trust? Is there galactic love of life?

I say yes. In any case, appreciating our planetarity as such is also a promissory note to the galaxy: We are evolving to know greater intelligibility—evolvably being with the galactic region where intelligent life is intrinsically receptive and appreciatively responsive.

Ultimately, being is fun—Yes?

The music of the spheres is our calling—perhaps to other spheres. Anyway, prospects of knowing We are not Alone are hauntingly wondrous (and haunted me for more than a few years).