“Intelligent life might be more likely in a Universe in flux. Ever since Copernicus put the Sun, rather than Earth, at the centre of the Universe, scientists and philosophers have suspected that there’s nothing special about our cosmic time and place. But two physicists now suggest otherwise.

Only galaxies about the age of our Milky Way have the right conditions for intelligent life to develop, argue Jaume Garriga of the University of Barcelona, Spain, and Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts1. And that age, they say, might coincide with a fundamental change in the Universe.

What’s more, the search for other planetary systems could tell us whether they’re right or not.” Nature