No planet is more earth-like than Earth itself, so if life really does pop up readily in earth-like conditions, then surely it should have arisen many times right here on our home planet? And how do we know it didn't? The truth is, nobody has looked.
A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If, as some evidence suggests, exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life, studying them could revolutionise biology, medicine and biotechnology.
If this is the only planet on which not only life, but intelligent life, has arisen, that would be very unusual.
Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence.
My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people and from reading the signs of the times. Discernment in the Lord guides me in my way of governing.
Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.
I was not interested in luxuries because I had an elegant life as a child. My family, very aristocratic, one of the richest in Colombia, educated me like a princess, in the English style.
No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it's the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.
In Aristotle the mind, regarded as the principle of life, divides into nutrition, sensation, and faculty of thought, corresponding to the inner most important stages in the succession of vital phenomena.
What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?
I feel great that I've been given a chance in the golden years of my life. To me, it's the last battle, and I've been given a chance to get stuck in some good armament, some good power, and there's a chance that now I can finish off my working years with my head held high.
When I started Giorgio Armani in the mid-'70s, I realized that women needed a way to dress that was equivalent to that of men - something that would give them dignity, an attitude that would help them handle their work life.
An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.
Perusing colorful storylines on the backs of book jackets, I realized that none of them could possibly be as dramatic as my life to date. Then sadly, I also realized I could never find the ending of my story from the safety of an armchair.
I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
'Battle: Los Angeles' - I've got to say this was easily one of the most physically trying things that I've ever done in my life because I play a Marine in the film, and they had us training with real live Marines for, like, three weeks. It gave me a whole new respect for just the armed forces, period.
