This deserves its thread to go into any depth but my (again, unsupported by observed fact) estimate of even odds for life on one of the icy moons isn’t proximity, but that I believe that life or life-like thermodynamically-moderating and self-replicating systems will spontaneously develop in essentially any environment with requisite energy and the right mix of elements in a fluid matrix, and that many of these will evolve into sufficient complexity and differentiation to survive all but the most cataclysmic changes. Life on Earth developed very early (within a few hundred million years of planetary formation, and likely within tens of millions of years of water condensing) in conditions that would only be tolerable to extremophile organisms today, so either something very, very special occurred on the nascent Earth, or ‘life’ in some form is likely to occur under even marginally favorable circumstances. Which, of course, is speculation (albeit based on a knowledge of biochemistry and what little we know of planetology), and my estimate of ~50% likelihood is completely without any factual basis.
The flaw in this reasoning is that you implicitly assume any development of life to something comparable to our level of development must follow the essentially same path and forms which is largely an assumed “just-so story” for life on Earth. We can pretty much guarantee that something exactly like mitochondria will not appear in another evolutionary chain but we actually have no reason to believe that this is the only instance of endosymbiosis of energy-generating bacteria into another cell, but it just happened to be the form that was most successful.
If the assertion that advanced life on Earth is a one-in-infinity occurrence due to the “immense number of hurdles that must be successfully navigated”, you actually have to apply a teleological frame to explain why it could only happen exactly here on Earth and nowhere else in the literally unimaginable expanse of the universe. It becomes a “Law of No Small Numbers” problem: in a large enough universe there are things that cannot physically occur, things that can only occur at one specific point in cosmic development (the ‘Big Bang’ and cosmic inflation), and things that, no matter how unlikely they are at any given point, will occur with some degree of regularity over sufficient space and time. Life is fundamentally just a set of chemical reactions that produces self-replicating protein structures, and while spontaneous generation of something of the complexity of a protein is extremely unlikely at any given point over a small interval of time, in a bath of organic compounds with billions of chemical reactions per second over millions of years, even the most unlikely compounds will appear with some statistical degree of frequency, and will sooner or later develop some stable forms that will have a tendency to replication. From there to technological sophistication is a long set of steps (although, again, not a singular linear path) but unless there is something that operates to actively prevent development, there is a random walk that goes from just-barely-alive to something that can ‘look’ up at the stars (although not with our poorly-designed backward facing retinas) and wonder who else is out there.
“Intelligence” that is measured by an IQ test is one narrow facet of cognitive capability, and arguably not even the best at representing a practical capacity for success. The ‘science’ of trying to define and quantify intelligence is actually rife with bad assumptions on top of the “biased and racist history” and methodological errors that you mention. IQ tells us something about the purely analytical and pattern-matching capabilities when taking an IQ test, and those correspond roughly to those abilities in a real world application which involve similar skills. However, there are plenty of people who could not score well on an IQ test but perform highly complex skills like animal tracking, land navigation without tools, et cetera far better than you and I could, because their early development and cultural exposure has prioritized developing their brains in those particular skill sets and not Euclidian geometry or solving abstract logic puzzles. To be sure, there are people who are more or less intelligent in different areas, but the intelligence quotient is at best a very restricted measurement of one narrow regime of intellectual capacity.
Stranger
