Why Only Americans Are Interested in the Hunt for Alien Life

Also, some US states are larger than entire countries and the percentages vary greatly by state. So depending on where you live in the United States it may feel like literally everyone is religious.

I live in a relatively liberal part of the country and I still feel the need to stay in the closet as an atheist for fear or being disowned by my community and family.

But back to the topic at hand, I think finding aliens would be definitive proof that at the very least the part about God creating earth as something unique and special is bogus.

In other words I think the origional poster is completely wrong. If you believe in God you should fear finding aliens. Philosophically many religious people have trouble reconciling with evolution, never mind another living creature on a planet other than our own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun... - yeah I know I shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source but I only have so much time to debate on Hacker News per day and finding quality sources takes time :(

Most plans/suggestions don't even look at the economics, or secondary factors. Like open-mining of rare minerals, mercury, etc in the mfg of low-energy light bulbs.

I'm all for reducing pollution and waste... I have a hyper-sensitive sense of smell, and the smog even in Phx is getting to be too much, let alone other cities I've been to. And, littering in general just pisses me off... but having 4-5 containers for recycling to sort things into, and then having that basically be a jobs program for sorters, when in the end most of it is still land-filled is a bit wasteful in itself.

There needs to be some pragmatism in terms of getting the biggest bang for the buck, and ineffective feel-good programs aren't the way to do get real impacting change.

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In terms of trade, not allowing trade with countries that don't meet or exceed U.S. quality of life requirements for workers would be a start. Disallowing diesel ships the ability to dock in U.S. ports over the next decade would do a lot as well. Disallowing airmail transport of packages, or heavily taxing would help a lot too.

Tax credits for hiring employees with less than a 20 minute commute could also go a long way too. Include employees able to work from home at least 60% of the time.

Enacting a national energy tax on companies with over 1000 employees could be a large impact as well.

It's possible to do a lot of these things without creating a lot of hard to manage subsidies that will exist long beyond the reasons for making them in the first place.

I don't think 10^22 is a very big number. If we try to guess the probability of life evolving at random, I can see it being negligible given that number of planets.

First we can try to calculate something easier, the famous monkeys banging on keyboards to try to type Hamlet. If we put 1 trillion monkeys on each planet, and let them try for a trillion years, with three attempts per day to make the math easier, we get a total of 10^49 attempts.

We'll consider a keyboard with 50 keys. 10^49 is roughly 50^29, which means we can expect one lucky monkey to get 29 characters into the play. That is impressive but not very far into a play with 30,557 words (150,000 characters?). (http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_numwo...)

Now consider human DNA. I am not a biology expert so I may not have my DNA right. But it looks like a typical human DNA molecule contains 500,000 to 2,500,000 nucleotides (http://wow-really.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-dna-would-reach-...). I believe there are 4 possibilities for each nulceotide. That means 4^2,500,000 or 10^1,500,000. That is a lot of possibilities. Worse even then typing Hamlet. And that would be if we just had monkeys supplied with adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine putting DNA together. Never mind that these are each complicated molecules in themselves that have to be assembled at random.

So how did we even get here? Well, thanks to quantum mechanics we have almost endless opportunities to end up here. It just seems unlikely that we and some other life ended up in the universe together.