Are we really alone - the "Rare Earth" hypothesis
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It’s still a numbers game. If one of a million systems has a planet in the Goldilocks zone, and if one of a million of those has the right chemical makeup, and if one in a million of those has… Then we have millions of other planets with life…
The distances are still the problem.
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They’ve written down a bunch of stuff that is necessary for one type of creature to develop. Who knows what alternatives there are with different starting conditions?
Humans can’t even agree whether eggs are healthy or not. I’d take our proclamations regarding anything more complex with a large grain of salt
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as the an anthropic principle states, if certain conditions are necessary to support awareness at the level where the aware creatures think about this stuff, then those conditions can be arbitrarily rare. They could be one in a trillion trillion trillion, and it still shouldn't make us wonder how it ever happened, or think that it should never happen. A trillion universes could have begun and ended without it happening once, and how could we say differently?
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as the an anthropic principle states, if certain conditions are necessary to support awareness at the level where the aware creatures think about this stuff, then those conditions can be arbitrarily rare. They could be one in a trillion trillion trillion, and it still shouldn't make us wonder how it ever happened, or think that it should never happen. A trillion universes could have begun and ended without it happening once, and how could we say differently?
@Horace said in Are we really alone - the "Rare Earth" hypothesis:
as the an anthropic principle states, if certain conditions are necessary to support awareness at the level where the aware creatures think about this stuff, then those conditions can be arbitrarily rare. They could be one in a trillion trillion trillion, and it still shouldn't make us wonder how it ever happened, or think that it should never happen. A trillion universes could have begun and ended without it happening once, and how could we say differently?
Right, so we're essentially lottery winners telling everybody else not to waste their money on a ticket because there's absolutely no chance they'll win, even though somebody wins sooner or later.
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Ultimately, we're either alone or we're not and we'll find out someday. The only way we're going to know is to get out there and get looking... We need the water, minerals, and real estate anyway...
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If we really knew how life started we would be recreating creation in the lab, at least the Chinese would.
And we would use the recipe to create all sorts of wonderful new creatures.
For example we would have creatures that eat carbon and supply free electricity for your car.
But since we are still clueless this won't happen any time soon.
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If we really knew how life started we would be recreating creation in the lab, at least the Chinese would.
And we would use the recipe to create all sorts of wonderful new creatures.
For example we would have creatures that eat carbon and supply free electricity for your car.
But since we are still clueless this won't happen any time soon.
@Copper said in Are we really alone - the "Rare Earth" hypothesis:
For example we would have creatures that eat carbon and supply free electricity for your car.
Trees?
