>I seem to recall a book called "Rare Earth" that talks about this written by a NASA scientist named Brownlee and came out about 2000 or so. Fascinating.
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>There's also the Fermi Paradox. If life evolves under the right circumstances, even if it's a billion-to-one shot, then where the heck is everyone?

Um.. everyone who? If you mean ET's, they're probably out there somewhere, but in general distances are so vast that the chances of our ever bumping into such a race are again, billions to 1.

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>Things get really complicated if you involve far-future beings ... the energy death of the universe would force survivors to, essentially, rethink the same thoughts....could we be a sim? Perhaps. But that begs off the original question because those gazillion year old folks would have had to have a start somewhere.
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>This is going to sound dumb, but it really bothers me that I'll pass away some day without ever knowing the answers to these questions.

You see? That is exactly why I'm not going.

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>>>Yeah, keep the concept, but dump the religion. For all we know, we're someone's science fair experiment.
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>>Saw a TV prog some months ago that talked about how unlikely life on Earth was and how lucky we are to be on a planet with the right distance from the Sun, the right-sized moon, etc., etc. The upshot was that our lives are so statistically improbable that it's more likely that we are indeed computer simulations in some alien's game, or projections from some far-future civilisation as their form of "time travel" - all a la "Matrix".
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>>Something like that >|:-|
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>>Food for simulated thought.