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Dozens? 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
by rytill 2y ago
Dozens? 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.