5 ms·
People underestimate how dead and hostile the space is to life in general. First of all, you can just swipe most of the available galaxy space off the table bec
by renegade-otter 2y ago
People underestimate how dead and hostile the space is to life in general. First of all, you can just swipe most of the available galaxy space off the table because of radiation - the center of the Milky Way, close to our "core" black hole, is just pure hell. This is why we inhabit a remote neighborhood of the galaxy. You can extrapolate that most spiral galaxies are like that and only a small sliver of them are "in play".
Earth won multiple jackpot lotteries in a row, and that's only the variables we are aware of:
* Right-sized star
* Right-sized planet
* Not too far and not to close to the star
* Not too little and not too much water
* Oxygen
* Iron core (magnetic field protects from radiation)
* Right-sized moon (keeps rotation stable, tides)
* Gas giants absorbing a lot of debris coming our away
* A single-star system, with nearly circular, stable planetary orbits (very rare)* ... and so on
Yes, I know there are permutations that might also work, but in general it does not look good for spontaneous life.I like a theory that states that the Universe is just the right size where one single Earth has only a single probability to spring up randomly. The Maker covered their tracks well, if you believe in higher intelligence.
- jhedwards 2y agoThis doesn't seem like the right calculation to me. Doing some quick lookups, I find that the number of galaxies in the universe is estimated to be between 200 billion and 2 trillion. As for stars in a galaxy, there are around 100 billion stars in the milky way galaxy, so lets go with that. If we guess that only about a quarter of any given galaxy is potentially habitable, that leaves 25 billion possibilities per galaxy. If we go with that and a middling estimate for the number of galaxies then we have maybe (25 billion * 1 trillion) stars, which is a number so big I don't even know how to say or comprehend it. Even if we take an extremely conservative view that each galaxy only has at most 25 stars with potentially habitable planets (cutting the 1/4 galaxy estimate down by a factor of one BILLION) then we are still left with 25 trillion possibilities, which seems like a pretty good chance to me.
- lowbloodsugar 2y agoSpace... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is...
- fragmede 2y agoAka Drake's equation, with sufficiently large numbers, gives a decent chance of habitability. We just don't know what the numbers really are. Those big enough numbers with small enough other names make for a low enough number that it might as well be zero since we can't observe or interact with them.
- czzr 2y agoOxygen doesn’t belong on that list, I think - the earth’s oxygen was made by the first living things.
- bongodongobob 2y agoThe didn't make the oxygen, they unlocked it from various molecules and minerals etc. It had to be here first.
- greiskul 2y agoBut I don't think there is anything special on there being oxygen in the cloud of gas that formed the solar system. The distribution of elements following a supernova probably follows some law, and oxygen is low enough on the periodic table that probably quite a bit of it is expected.
- czzr 2y agoTrue - oxygen is very abundant, though, so its presence is not surprising.
- White_Wolf 2y agoYou are making a few (?wrong) assumptions here: - that we are first - oxygen is needed for all life forms - the habitable zone that is ideal for us the only one that can give birth to intelligent life - magnetic field is needed for life to exist/radiation kills off all life