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The "Jupiter as a shield" hypothesis has been questioned recently: https://phys.org/news/2016-02-jupiter-role-planetary-shield-...


That's fair enough, the point I tried to make is: Statistically, we would expect our solar system to be average among solar systems that can support intelligent life, not among all solar systems (following the Anthropic Principle). Therefore, the difference we see between our solar system and the average star system might imply something about what kind of conditions make intelligent life more probable in a star system.

If we see that in all star systems we know that evolved intelligent life (even if there's only 1 we know of) there is a large Jupiter-like planet, and that's very atypical among star systems, that suggests that Jupiter might have increased the probability that intelligent life evolved here.




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