I repost something I wrote almost nine years ago about how life depended upon the cosmological history of our solar system. We are made from the dust of stars, quite literally. Generations of stars had to die to make the chemical elements our world is made of, and the life we have on Earth. In the intervening years much more has been learned about the other bodies that orbit our sun, with strong hints that there is a chance that life of some form, or the chemicals that make it, could exist elsewhere in the solar system.
Elizabeth Stott - to Blog or Not 