4 ms·

Water being common doesn't mean life is common. We have the intuition to be aware that the exact atomic configuration of a boeing 747 getting replicated by pure

Water being common doesn't mean life is common. We have the intuition to be aware that the exact atomic configuration of a boeing 747 getting replicated by pure chance on a planet 500 light years away is impossibly low. So impossibly low that I'm willing to bet my life that it won't ever happen, not just on a planet 500 light years away, but on every planet in the universe. What are the chances of life being on a planet 500 light years away? Unfortunately the definition of life is vague and the chemical processes required by life aren't even completely understood. Without knowing the processes/materials necessary to ignite the self replicating processes required for life we don't possess the information necessary to know whether life is probable or improbable. Even in a universe with plentiful water and plentiful habitable planets, without context on what started it all we can't make any meaningful prediction. Is life like the boeing 747 or is it not? I always find it ludicrous when someone says the universe is just so vast that life has to exist somewhere else. We just don't have enough understanding/context to know.

throwaway344 12y ago
Of course, there is a planet that astronomers and others are very familiar where 747s appear all the time. They just happen through complex chemical reactions. Apparently they do that near some hive of theirs called "Seattle"
- crimsonalucard 12y ago
  every planet, OTHER then this one.
  - meric 12y ago
    The probability of humans colonising another planet and setting up a museum with a 747 is a little bit more than impossibly low.
    - crimsonalucard 12y ago
      ha! I meant the spontaneous formation of a 747. Like a tornado throwing all the materials together and a 747 being formed just off of pure chance. I'd still bet against that museum though.
lucianmarin 12y ago
It’s called Abiogenesis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis I think life is created right now on Earth from scratch (chemical elements), but we need to find proof.
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
To answer the question about if life is rare we need to visit Europa and Enceladus in our solar system. If those places have life, then life might be quite common in our universe. If they do not have life, then we are likely very alone in the universe.
- crimsonalucard 12y ago
  Maybe the probability that that life will occur is one planet out of every thousand planets. Then the probability of Europa having life is small. However one out of a thousand in a universe with billions of planets is a meaningful number. If this is the case, then examining our own solar system for life, which is comprised of far fewer then 1000 planets, will not be a worthwhile endeavor. I think the key is understanding the process itself. What does it take to create the minimal self replicating machines necessary to evolve into the complex forms we see today? Once we are aware of the processes involved in the formation of life then we have the context to hypothesize about the probability that these reactions will spontaneously occur. Things like the Drake equation are meaningless and made up. You can easily make up an identical bullshit equation about the chances of a 747 spontaneously being thrown together on another planet. We can easily see that it's impossible because we know how the 747 is made, we have context. For life? We have no context, no knowledge of where it came from, and therefore the drake equation and any other statement about life on other planets is meaningless.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    We have plenty of context for how life forms - organic chemistry! Lets not pretend life is some magical thing - its an organization of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. And those things just adore linking up in enormous variety given the right temperature and water. Early Earth was an unimaginably huge petri dish where every grain of sand on every beach was an organic experiment, with the sun, tides and seasons trying every combination of heat/cold/wet/dry/acid/base... in endless cycles. Those conditions are far from unique in the universe. You could argue its inevitable that life/chemistry will unfold in the same patterns on millions of worlds.

throwaway344 12y ago

Of course, there is a planet that astronomers and others are very familiar where 747s appear all the time. They just happen through complex chemical reactions. Apparently they do that near some hive of theirs called "Seattle"

crimsonalucard 12y ago
every planet, OTHER then this one.
- meric 12y ago
  The probability of humans colonising another planet and setting up a museum with a 747 is a little bit more than impossibly low.
  - crimsonalucard 12y ago
    ha! I meant the spontaneous formation of a 747. Like a tornado throwing all the materials together and a 747 being formed just off of pure chance. I'd still bet against that museum though.

lucianmarin 12y ago

It’s called Abiogenesis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis I think life is created right now on Earth from scratch (chemical elements), but we need to find proof.

IndianAstronaut 12y ago

To answer the question about if life is rare we need to visit Europa and Enceladus in our solar system. If those places have life, then life might be quite common in our universe. If they do not have life, then we are likely very alone in the universe.

crimsonalucard 12y ago
Maybe the probability that that life will occur is one planet out of every thousand planets. Then the probability of Europa having life is small. However one out of a thousand in a universe with billions of planets is a meaningful number. If this is the case, then examining our own solar system for life, which is comprised of far fewer then 1000 planets, will not be a worthwhile endeavor. I think the key is understanding the process itself. What does it take to create the minimal self replicating machines necessary to evolve into the complex forms we see today? Once we are aware of the processes involved in the formation of life then we have the context to hypothesize about the probability that these reactions will spontaneously occur. Things like the Drake equation are meaningless and made up. You can easily make up an identical bullshit equation about the chances of a 747 spontaneously being thrown together on another planet. We can easily see that it's impossible because we know how the 747 is made, we have context. For life? We have no context, no knowledge of where it came from, and therefore the drake equation and any other statement about life on other planets is meaningless.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  We have plenty of context for how life forms - organic chemistry! Lets not pretend life is some magical thing - its an organization of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. And those things just adore linking up in enormous variety given the right temperature and water. Early Earth was an unimaginably huge petri dish where every grain of sand on every beach was an organic experiment, with the sun, tides and seasons trying every combination of heat/cold/wet/dry/acid/base... in endless cycles. Those conditions are far from unique in the universe. You could argue its inevitable that life/chemistry will unfold in the same patterns on millions of worlds.