3 ms·
Where do you get that intelligent life is inevitable from a sample size of one?
by goatlover 6y ago
Where do you get that intelligent life is inevitable from a sample size of one?
- splistud 6y agoBecause we're not working from a sample size of one. But if we were, then what other possible conclusion would there be?
- goatlover 6y agoWe are, since Earth has the only life known in the universe to date. The other possible conclusions are any probability < 1, which means not inevitable.
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 6y agoLife is inevitable + Evolution is a universal law = Intelligent life is inevitable Given the proper conditions, that is. A planet that is just a ball of magma won't see life (as we know it) until it cools down.
- goatlover 6y agoGiven the proper conditions, life might form once in a thousand planets, and intelligent life might be one in a billion. We don't know, but there's some probability for both. It could be really low, or it could be relatively high. The Rare Earth solution to the Fermi Paradox is as good a guess as any. Life of some kind might be relatively common, but intelligent life could still be really rare. We are the only species on Earth in 3.5 billion years to make radio telescopes and spacecraft. On other worlds, it might never happen because of the thousand different factors that led to hominid evolution which might be different elsewhere. For example, If the non-avian dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct from a large meteor impact, who knows whether any technological civilization would have ever formed. At any rate, mammalian evolution would have gone differently, and it's anyone's guess whether some non-hominid intelligent species would have evolved instead. They didn't during the age of the dinosaurs. We don't even know whether multicellular life is a low probability event. Maybe Cambrian explosions don't happen very often. There's no inevitability here, only unknown probabilities.