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I'm okay with the Field of Dreams interpretation of astrobiology: "If you build it, they will come", so to speak. All you need is for life to take hold once and
by rflrob 16y ago
I'm okay with the Field of Dreams interpretation of astrobiology: "If you build it, they will come", so to speak. All you need is for life to take hold once and it'll take over a planet in just a few billion years. Of course, my own hunch is that suitable chunks of rock (planets, moons, etc) are somewhat more rare than the default value[1].
[1] I plugged in .1, among other variable changes. On the other hand, I got the number of communicating civilizations = .02, so either I'm too pessimistic or we're just really, really lucky.
- jawee 16y agoI think there are far too many happen chances in evolutionary biology to say that an advanced civilization is inevitable; my rational mind has a LOT of trouble accepting that our current development is a long history of happen-stances beginning from life´s first development, but I see no viable alternative. But to think that given another Earth with life it would happen again? With all of the stretches that happen all along the evolutionary tree I find this absurd.
- eru 16y agoThere are lots of stretches on our path, but we don't know how likely other paths would be.
- rflrob 16y agoI concur. Fortunately, the Drake equation gives us separate variables for "develops life" and "develops intelligent life". The value I used for f_i was somewhat lower than they gave, but I also thought that f_c was higher, so it worked out as a wash.