91–100 of 161 posts
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Yes it will be approaching 1, the same as for 10^24 coin tosses the number of heads would be approaching 50% (or 5*(10^23)).
Given the definition of "expected value," it is identically 1 (as opposed to merely "approaching it"). Sorry, I'm not trying to be pedantic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value
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We don't know all the factors under which life can exist. Even the lifeforms that we do know of, occupy a very broad spectrum in all metrics, existing at all sorts of extremes. We even have evidence of life we have never seen, will never encounter, and may never even have conceived as being possible to exist without that evidence: the enormous dinosaurs.
There's a huge difference between what evolved organisms can adapt to, and the conditions necessary to start life. Look, humans already adapted to being in space for prolonged periods of time. We adapted to every climate. But drop a naked human in a random spot on our planet, and he will die with high degree of probability. And that's after billions of years of evolution.
"It makes me so impatient for a more powerful telescope with the ability to see far into the infrared, because I can’t help but wonder what’s still invisible to even the XDF. Twice as many galaxies? Four times? Fainter ones, redder ones, more distant ones, or all of them? There’s at least 176 billion of them in our Universe, but I can’t help wonder, “how many more?”"
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/10/10/how-many-g...
"It boggles the mind that over 90% of the galaxies in the Universe have yet to be studied."
Maybe this one's different, but when discussing astronomical terms, a factor of 10 doesn't ever surprise me. What does surprise me, continuously, is how many unimaginably large numbers of factors of 10 are involved in anything related to the size of the universe. There are so many estimated stars in the universe, it would make little difference to my already boggling mind if our estimates were off by a factor of a million.
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> How, when given the evidence of practically infinite planets out there [...] can we even consider the possibility that this is the only planet with life? Human minds aren't good with very large numbers. What seems "practically infinite" to us - isn't, really. The number of all planets in the universe is said to be in the ballpark of 10^24. Meaning (obviously) if you keep on dividing it by 10, in just 24 steps you g…
I agree with you in that we will probably never have contact with another sentient species of extra terrestrial origin. The distances are to vast, the lifetimes of civilisations and even species too short and so on. However I do think that you vastly underestimate the probability of life. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms . See how quickly life appeared once the earth had cooled d…
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mankind has been extremely lucky with our environments, among others: - Jupiter & Saturn pick out most of the comets, so we encounter massive reset only very rarely - thanx to hitting other planet long time ago, we have a spinning molten metal core inside planet generating magnetic shield for all nasty radiation - moon gives us tides & stability - our sun is just the right size and age to be stable - we're located at…
You're assuming that all life will be like ours. This is a safe bet, but there could be very many ways for life to exist.
Carbon is the only atom [I know of] that can form long chains of double bonds (even triple though they tend to be unstable enough to not matter). Nothing else allows the chemical complexity needed for self reproduction.
Water is a weird molecule. Many chemical reactions happen in water that would be uncontrolled or not happen at all without water. The polar properties, the fact that is expands when it freezes (that is frozen water floats on liquid), and acid/bases are all interesting properties that are very useful for life. I suppose that something else could fill this role, but since water is common in the universe I doubt it.
Yes life elsewhere is unknown and so we cannot say for sure it will not look like our, but chemistry is a known.
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> Isn't that even more interesting? Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible? We know it's possible, but we've also seen it happen only once . The observational data we have suggests the universe is mostly dead - that is, not complex . Or, in other words, boring . Discovery of any complex process on a comparable level to even simplest of what we call life would be a civilization-changing breakthro…
> It would also ultimately kill off most of our existing religions I think you may be underestimating the tenacity of religions
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One could flip your argument and say defining life as purely organic is a failure of imagination. The thing about searching for "life" over "intelligence" is that life doesn't necessarily need to be intelligent for it to be interesting. I also think the SETI example you've made is a tad unfair because their process dictates that their search be for intelligence (crudely put, radio transmissions). Whereas when you're…
> One could flip your argument and say defining life as purely organic is a failure of imagination. That's right! So how would you define life? Or the meta-question, why bother? We gain nothing from figuring out what's "alive" and what has "merely" a rich complexity. "Search for life" is a category error. > The thing about searching for "life" over "intelligence" is that life doesn't necessarily need to be intelligen…
This is not to subtract from geology which is an interesting and useful study, just to say it is unlikely we would discover anything very new if we could somehow examine every planet in the universe. However if we add in life we would expect a lot of interesting variety to study.
And some people still aren’t sure if there is other life beyond Earth. :) That's entire galaxies. Not just stars, and that's just the observable universe. We are still being surprised by the lifeforms we observe here on Earth, and the environments and conditions they can thrive in (including the outer hulls of our spacecraft), and we still have yet to discover and catalog all the life on our planet. Life may even com…
@ASmallFiction had a beautiful, succinct take on this recently: "Are we alone in the universe?" she asked. "Yes," said the Oracle. "So there's no other life out there?" "There is. They're alone too." https://twitter.com/ASmallFiction/status/946608733982822401
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> One could flip your argument and say defining life as purely organic is a failure of imagination. That's right! So how would you define life? Or the meta-question, why bother? We gain nothing from figuring out what's "alive" and what has "merely" a rich complexity. "Search for life" is a category error. > The thing about searching for "life" over "intelligence" is that life doesn't necessarily need to be intelligen…
> Isn't that even more interesting? Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible? We know it's possible, but we've also seen it happen only once . The observational data we have suggests the universe is mostly dead - that is, not complex . Or, in other words, boring . Discovery of any complex process on a comparable level to even simplest of what we call life would be a civilization-changing breakthro…
Religion tends to be very careful to stay in the area of not providing a testable hypothesis which means that new alien knowledge won't prove it wrong.
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> Isn't that even more interesting? Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible? We know it's possible, but we've also seen it happen only once . The observational data we have suggests the universe is mostly dead - that is, not complex . Or, in other words, boring . Discovery of any complex process on a comparable level to even simplest of what we call life would be a civilization-changing breakthro…
Most existing religions are silent on the subject of life elsewhere. Since they do not say "it doesn't exist" finding life doesn't mean anything (it might even grow as they have a new group of life to convert). Religion tends to be very careful to stay in the area of not providing a testable hypothesis which means that new alien knowledge won't prove it wrong.
> Religion tends to be very careful to stay in the area of not providing a testable hypothesis which means that new alien knowledge won't prove it wrong.
That's true, but until very recently, the idea of life elsewhere wasn't really considered seriously.