WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

In the grand scheme of the cosmos, life on earth might have popped up far sooner than it should have.

A team led by Harvard astronomy department chair Avi Loeb crunched some numbers comparing the size of stars to how soon life should form on the habitable planets that surround them. The team predicts that the odds of life developing around the more common and smaller red dwarf stars will increase drastically in the future. In other words, when it comes to life, maybe we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Life has lots of prerequisites. It starts with a planet orbiting a star, so the star's energy can fuel the life-inducing chemical reactions. Those reactions generally occur in liquid water, so the planet needs to sit in a so-called habitable zone, a distance from the star where the planet is too warm for water to freeze and too cold for water to boil. The planet also needs to have oxygen, carbon, and other elements, and weigh enough so that its gravity can hold onto an atmosphere. But are those conditions unique to the Earth?

"The general idea that many people subscribe to is that, since we exist next to a star like the Sun in a galaxy like the Milky Way, for life to exist you need these conditions," Loeb told Popular Science. "But in fact, low-mass stars are much more common than the Sun. The sun isn't a typical star. Low-mass stars are very long-lived; they can live 1,000 times longer."

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