this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

I believe that life as we know it exists somewhere else in the universe .

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Tied to this, I believe there is no intelligent life close enough to ever reach us physically (short of freezing themselves and traveling millions of years, but we really aren't worth that trip lol) I don't believe faster than light travel will ever exist.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

Has anyone calculated like "the odds" of it probabalistically?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago

If you take standard cosmological assumptions (the universe is infinite and homogeonous) then the odds are 100% as everything that is physically possible happens infinite times.

unless you mean the observable universe, in which case we dont know, but given the vast scale of it is likely very close to 1. We cant calculate it without knowing how likely life is to form in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

It was calculated decades ago. I remember Carl Sagan talking about it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

I'm not sure exactly how else you might calculate it, but, we know life is possible, so in an infinitely large universe, containing infinite stars with infinite planets existing for an infinite amount of time, the odds of life existing on another planet can't be less than 100%.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago

The Drake Equation is a probabilistic formula meant to derive the number of civilizations which humans could potentially communicate with.

The fermi paradox does challenge the formula though, as it implies fi and/or fc are very small or zero.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

What if the earth is a singular and universal outlier?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Chances are they won't be oxygen breathers anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Do we already have that with the crazy anerobic volcano or the high-temperature deep sea vent dwelling microorganisms or something?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

Bold of you to assume life on earth originated on earth.