Intelligent life is unlikely to exist everywhere in the universe + China’s new fix for falling birth rates
Space oddities unlikely: Leading astrobiologists believe that simple life is widespread across the universe — but more advanced intelligent life is less likely, reports the Financial Times. The claims come from scientists forming the Origins Federation, a scientific collaboration for research on the emergence and early evolution of life on Earth and its presence in the cosmos, established last week. Several of the scientists in the Origins Federation are conducting research on the development of alien life forms using our own early evolutionary emergence as a starting point. “Chemistry is itching to make life,” but that doesn’t ensure survival, said one federation member. Intelligent life equipped with advanced technologies might tend to destroy itself: “As you get more knowledge, it becomes easier to destroy yourself,” says the federation’s leader Didier Queloz.
Life is embedded into the laws of physics of the universe, says Queloz, a co-discoverer of the first known exoplanet — a planet orbiting a star other than our sun. Since the discovery in the 1990s, more than 5k exoplanets have been identified — a game changer providing a diverse range of biosignatures for scientists to study.
A focus on women’s rights is China’s latest endeavor to boost falling birth rates in the country, which plummeted last year to an all-time low of 6.77 births per 1k people, Reuters reports. Members of China’s top political body have been proposing a host of incentives to boost population growth, including allowing unmarried women to access fertility services like egg freezing, enabling them to register newborns, providing education without charge to families with a third child born after 2024, and expanding maternity and paternity leaves to facilitate co-parenting.
The culprit behind China’s shrinking population? China’s one child policy, which was implemented between 1980 and 2015. The strict policy subjected mns of women to forced contraception, abortion, and sterilization, imposing hefty fines on families that broke the rules. Even now that the policy has been scrapped, couples are more likely to have fewer children due to high childcare and education costs, Reuters reports.