alt Hacker News >those 10,000 or so systems could have life, but the rest of the universe not have life.
I was thinking bigger: if panspermia gets dramatically more viable, then nebula could switch over in their probability distribution from "default sterile" to default teeming.
In this scenario, we could find (related!) life essentially everywhere, and caused by panspermia no less, despite numbers still saying panspermia is wildly improbable for mature stars.
"Default teaming" really isn't viable due to the Fermi problem.
But if OoL is extremely unlikely, the cluster panspermia idea still allows extraterrestrial life to reasonably exist and be reachable, because that life didn't require a separate highly unlikely OoL event.
I think SETI should focus on stars that look like the Sun's siblings.