We may be unique, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're special.

The sea and the land both teem with life, but the richest and most hospitable place for living things is the tidal zone, between the low and high water mark.

Life not only seeks hospitable conditions, it also thrives in areas, and times, of constant change. There are other dimensions to reality besides space and time, like complexity.

Once again, consider Carson's words...

"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us -- a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself."

From The Edge of the Sea
- Rachel Carson (1955)