R.J.Spivey writes a provocative essay for the arXiv…
From Fermions to the Fermi Paradox: A Fertile Cosmos Fit for Life?
…basically Spivey suggests we’re jumping to conclusions too soon about Life in the Cosmos, that the real party is after our current Stelliferous Era, when Life exists in a multitude of planets formed from supernova remnants, powered by neutrino annihilation in pressurized iron. Spivey is also disinclined to include us as that “Life” – we might yet attain that level of advancement, but for now our Future fate is for us to create. We might fail to advance to the level of Galactic Colonists, able to adapt to Ocean planets under ice, living off the thin trickle of energy from neutrinos (via the reverse photo-neutrino effect) for 100 billion trillion years. He suggests that the efforts to make artificial life will fail and that we’ll need to hone our bioengineering skills to remodel an ecosystem fit for the Ocean planets of the distant future.