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> Isn't it intuitive that there is a strong chance we are alone, or is it just me? I went to a pretty conservative high school. I had no trouble convincing co

> Isn't it intuitive that there is a strong chance we are alone, or is it just me? I went to a pretty conservative high school. I had no trouble convincing conservative (evolution is a lie) christians that we are probably not alone in the universe, because it is intuitive that we aren't alone. It went like this: * There is probably at least one planetoid per star that could support (microbial) life as we know it. * 100 billion stars per galaxy. * A trillion galaxies. * In these trillions of places that could support life, there is not a single microbe? So much for God's infinite power. He must really hate life. The sheer hubris that there isn't any life in any of the other trillion galaxies usually makes people reconsider. Now I followed this up with the fact that we are probably never going to see any of these alien lifeforms, particularly if they are just bacteria in another galaxy. The distances are too vast. An argument could be made that god put life exactly once in each galaxy, and that we have a manifest destiny to colonize it. (You see this argument gleefully applied to resource extraction on earth.) But I never convinced anyone to give all their money to Nasa as part of god's plan.

chicob 9y ago
But it is known that people have a bias towards tangible figures, like meaningful probabilities and round numbers. This heavily distorts the range of imaginable possibilities. Probabilities are real numbers between 0 and 1. For example, 1.E-301 is one of them. But if one is to take that probability out of a hat people just blatantly ignore it. >The sheer hubris that there isn't any life in any of the other trillion galaxies usually makes people reconsider. Hubris is on both sides of this, isn't it? On the face of little to no evidence, how can we estimate such probabilities?

chicob 9y ago

But it is known that people have a bias towards tangible figures, like meaningful probabilities and round numbers. This heavily distorts the range of imaginable possibilities. Probabilities are real numbers between 0 and 1. For example, 1.E-301 is one of them. But if one is to take that probability out of a hat people just blatantly ignore it. >The sheer hubris that there isn't any life in any of the other trillion galaxies usually makes people reconsider. Hubris is on both sides of this, isn't it? On the face of little to no evidence, how can we estimate such probabilities?