okay i see his probability is based solely upon ‘earth-like’ planets which drastically reduces the number of bodies in space we are considering here… so in that case i guess it is a more reasonable number… but given all the stars we are aware of i would expect predictions of the number of ‘earth like planets’ would still be in the billions which would still result in thousands and thousands of instances of life emerging… so in that respect it still seems like a pretty high number
I dont think it matter how small of percentage each solar system has as far as hosting life. There are infinite planets, therefore there are infinite alien species.
even if there is life on 1 out of 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 planets. If the number is infinite then the number of aliens is infinite. Some people tend to think that the universe stops at the furthest point that our best telescope can see.
well in that line of thinking if everything is infinite then this very same conversation is happening on the internet between all these same individuals except we are all look like guinea pigs speaking mandarin off on some distant planet…
now how reasonable does that sound?
once you say everything is infinite then every possible series of events is possible… every outcome… there will be millions of planets where the last time you crossed the street you got hit by a car where the time before that you got hit by a car instead…and on and on and on… it basically sets up a situation where there are limitless alternate “universes” where there would never have to be any ‘aliens’ it would just be all the exact same people doing slightly different things than we are doing here…
is anyone familiar with the story ‘the library of babel’ its a good analogy for the universe…
You could argue this any angle. What exactly is your stance? Do you think we are the only possible life forms in the universe? I’m a little confused at your bent exactly.
i’m saying that the infinity arguement is a cop out… as i said before vast amounts of time and space doesn’t mean you will get anything more meaningful than what we witness here on earth
the library of babel is a good example for this… its a basically limitless library filled with 500 page volumes… within these volumes necessarily every possible book ever written resides as well as every book that will ever be written and every draft version of those books, a perfectly edited biography of me and you and even ones that are just lightly imperfect… this conversation must reside somewhere in those volumes as well as it is every possible combination of the ABCs stored in those volumes…
the problem is if you were to go and try to read any of these books it would take a lifetime to find even one that was even partially legible… the overwhelming majority- in fact almost all of the books would be total gibberish…
life on earth is like finding ‘the davinci code’ within that library…
Real? Some kind of viral video hoax? :gotme:
Lol, k.