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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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What if the earth is a singular and universal outlier?
That's just arrogant.
Please subtract the assumptions and respond to specific claim. Life is a lottery. What are the equivalent chances of that in coinflips analogy and then give the response in the approximate amount of times that could happen over an eternity or minimally the "death of our galaxy or universe" context
I'll break it down further.
We know life is possible, because we're here.
Nobody knows the exact odds of life being created, but we know it's >0. One in a billion? Trillion?
So imagine a trillion sided die. If you roll a 1, life is created.
If you get only one chance, you probably aren't creating life, but if you are allowed to roll the die constantly from the instant of the big bang, until the end of time, you WILL roll a one. Now, imagine an infinite number of planets rolling an infinite number of trillion sided dice for billions of years.
Sure, it's very unlikely for any individual roll to be 1, but it's downright IMPOSSIBLE for NONE of them to EVER roll it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that there are aliens flying around and probing people. I don't believe that's true at all. But there is life out there. Maybe it's just plants or bacteria, or some form of living rock that we've never encountered before, but it's out there.
I say it's arrogant because Earth is a tiny insignificant speck in the universe, and assuming that only YOUR planet can randomly produce life is a very self centered point of view.
Bold of you to assume life on earth originated on earth.
For life in general I would agree but for human level intelligence I'm not so sure, in our galaxy anyway. The number of things that had to line up for us to be the dominant lifeform on the planet is enormous.
Goldilocks zone. Life. Large outer gas giants. Complex life (someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe this has only happened once in 4B years / all complex lifeforms have a common ancestor) Oxygen tolerant life. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Multiple mass extinctions. Planet habitable for enormously long periods. Evolution of large brains for the first time. Etc
Chances are they won't be oxygen breathers anyway.
Do we already have that with the crazy anerobic volcano or the high-temperature deep sea vent dwelling microorganisms or something?
Don’t be too sure about that. If you look around online, you should be able to find chemistry predictions for intelligent life. While not assuming any compatible chemistry, we can look at some of the basic types of reactions needed to support a life form and the type of environment we assume. Apparently carbon and oxygen based chemistry is most favorable