In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realised new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.
"The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens," said Dr Aditya Chopra from the Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Earth Sciences.
"Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive," said Chopra.
About four billion years ago Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox.
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Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilise the rapidly changing environment, said Associate Professor Charley Lineweaver from the ANU Planetary Science Institute.
"Life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilising the planet's climate," he said.
Wet, rocky planets, with the ingredients and energy sources required for life seem to be ubiquitous, however, as physicist Enrico Fermi pointed out in 1950, no signs of surviving extra-terrestrial life have been found.
A plausible solution to Fermi's paradox, say the researchers, is near universal early extinction, which they have named the Gaian Bottleneck.
The research was published in the journal Astrobiology.