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"As for a planet that is Earth-like (or Mars-like when Mars was similar to Earth), I think it is a 98% chance or higher." I suppose this is where we disagree.
by jey 19y ago
"As for a planet that is Earth-like (or Mars-like when Mars was similar to Earth), I think it is a 98% chance or higher."
I suppose this is where we disagree. I put it at well under 1%, even if we were to assume that the panspermia hypothesis is true.
On the other hand, assuming panspermia, there's enough of a chance for life to be on Mars given the fact that its neighbor has life. Finding life on Mars could also lend support to the panspermia hypothesis.
- Retric 19y agoThe earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Life showed up within the first 1/2 billion years right around the time it cooled off enough for life to be possible. But let's say it's 50 / 50 every 500 million years (I think it's a lot higher than that.) well that's 99.8% after 4.5 billion years. Note: If that seems high it's about the same as 1 chance in 1000 per million years for any form of life to show up.
- jey 19y agoJey draws a ball from an urn, inspects it, and sees that it is a red ball. I now proclaim that all balls in the urn are red.
- Retric 19y agoI agree that extracting information from a sample size of one is a bad idea but so is ignoring all evidence even if the sample size is one. Anyway, life need not be a complex process: http://www.livescience.com/animals/060609_life_origin.html http://www.livescience.com/animals/060609_life_origin.html It might seem odd for a random process to end up with a life form but there are a lot of possible life forms that could work. AKA picking a single winning lottery ticket is hard but winning the lottery is not that hard if you could buy a million tickets that never expire.