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Out of the dozens of planets in the universe, Earth is not likely to be so unique that it is the only place where life has arisen.
by zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
Out of the dozens of planets in the universe, Earth is not likely to be so unique that it is the only place where life has arisen.
- pfdietz 2y agoThis statement doesn't seem to follow from anything. Why is Earth "not likely to be so unique"?
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoYour comment is not worth replying to. https://www.space.com/30172-six-most-earth-like-alien-planets.html https://www.space.com/30172-six-most-earth-like-alien-planet...
- pfdietz 2y agoIt's weird you think that link settles things. A planet could be Earth-like without having life. We don't know how likely life is to arise on an Earth-like planet. In particular, we cannot conclude that because we are here, the probability of it happening on Earth was high, due to observer selection bias. https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/W6-Observer-selection-effects.pdf https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/W6-Observer-sele...
- rytill 2y agoDozens? Don't you mean, probably hundreds of trillions in the observable universe? Not that the number of planets really implies anything when we don't know the probability of life arising on one of them.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoNo. I meant dozens. Hundreds of trillions is dozens
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoI don't doubt that you intended this meaning but doesn't that seem unnecessarily ambiguous to you? Usually when people say "dozens" they mean some small handful of dozens with an absolute number probably smaller than 200 (otherwise most would say "hundreds"). Few people are going to think "hundreds of trillions" when someone says "dozens". If one is expected to think "hundreds of trillions" in this case, it seems they should be equally expected to think "hundreds of quadrillions" which would be incorrect here. Even if one agrees that "dozens" is accurate to mean "hundreds of trillions" it still misses the mark for the argument because the odds come from the high number of planets. That is to say, there are very low odds that any individual planet harbors life but ostensibly much greater odds that one planet in a set of planets harbors life. Saying "hundreds of trillions" gets that point across better than "dozens".
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoI had no idea if the number of planets was estimated to be in billions or trillions and I wasn't going to look it up. So I went with dozens.