Theorize that once life arises, say, on a planet, it's hard for all life on the planet to then go extinct.
Theorized mechanism: life, once it arises, expands to many niches via evolution, naturally resulting in biodiversity. (Perhaps this should be the definition of life.) With biodiversity, it's hard for changes in the environment, either exogenous or even caused by life itself, to cause all life to go extinct. Something is always weird enough to survive new weird conditions.
Possible problems: the planet might be very homogenous, resulting in little biodiversity. Astronomical changes in the environment can be very extreme, very violent. It's hard to imagine how biodiversity could win against a supernova or black hole. (Though life probably had escaped earlier.)
More radically, we propose the same theory except not just for life but also for intelligent life. (Others have also proposed this.) Intelligent life can additionally adapt with technology faster than mutation and evolution.
More possible problems: intelligent life might have little biodiversity. Intelligent life is also more capable of doing things to (accidentally) extinct itself.
Should we support our human species fracturing into multiple biologically incompatible species adapted to different ecological niches, for the good of the survival of some intelligent life? It seems this would be a recipe for war and genocide (which we already do enough of). Speciation is probably inevitable once we colonize space, other planets, and other star systems.
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