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Alejandro

I believe that there are others. The universe is way too big for a single complex life form

HoloKat 1w ago 💬 1

yeah but think of how many things have to align to enable complex life:

- proximity to stars

- low variability in star's activity (it took life about 4 billion years to evolve to complex organisms)

- The age of the universe as we know it currently is 13.8 billion, and it took 4 of those billion years to evolve life here.

- climate stabilized by our relatively large moon, prevent tidal locking (just the right size)

- Earth being just the right size with the right gravity amount to retain sufficient atmosphere

- an active magnetosphere to protect us from getting our atmosphere stripped, timed correctly to the formation of the planet during active star stage (early development)

- Sufficient rotation rate

- Active plate tectonics - not common as far as we know

probably another 10-20 factors I can't even think of.. something as stupid as Jupiter existing where it does.

It takes a long and uninterrupted time frame for complex life to evolve as far as we understand now. When you look at the probability of complex life evolving - it looks like it's extremely rare.

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micahcmiracle 1w ago

Perhaps not as rare as the universe is large.

OzzyHB 1w ago 💬 1

100's of planets have already been found within habitable zone. That just in the areas of the milky way we can observe. There are BILLIONS of other galaxies.. Likely many millions of species throughout the universe. Intelligent life though at the same time as us, may be a much lower number though.

HoloKat 1w ago 💬 1

A habitable zone is just ONE of like 10 factors AT LEAST that we think allows for complex life. That means you have to multiple every one of those factors together, not add them. The odds drop significantly with each new factor.

Chris Liss 1w ago 💬 1

The odds against are paradoxically the best argument for other intelligent life — basically no chance we happened randomly. And if it’s not random then it’s by design which means the universe self-organizes generally into intelligent life.

HoloKat 1w ago 💬 1

None of the things you point out are equivalent to the next. If it’s not random doesn’t mean it was designed. And even if it does self organized there’s no reason it does so into intelligent life. We only have one data point that it happened here, you can’t extrapolate that to some broader certainty.

Chris Liss 1w ago

We have one data point: an odds-defying miracle. But of course one is free to draw one’s own conclusions from that.

OzzyHB 1w ago

Billions of Galaxy's..

wymike 1w ago 💬 1

There’s a formula (Greenspan? Green-something-) that tries to estimate how many planets have life (or could sustain life, I don’t recall exactly). In essence it says that even though the probability of life is so small, the universe is so vast that it’s almost a certainty that it will happen a bunch of times.

Add to this we’re only looking for planets that could sustain life as we understand it.

And

Because the universe is so vast and old the chances of life happening somewhere else and us being able to observe it are still incredibly small.

HoloKat 1w ago 💬 1

We haven’t picked up any bio or techno signatures and we’ve been looking.

wymike 1w ago 💬 1

Yep, but maybe they are so far away that they haven’t reached us yet.

Or maybe we’re not looking for the right things.

Or maybe life that we might be able to observe hasn’t evolved far enough for us to observe.

Or maybe it came and went long before we even started looking.

HoloKat 1w ago 💬 1

Ya, many questions and possibilities.

wymike 1w ago 💬 1

My personal position is that there is / was / will be other life in the universe but we’ll probably never know about it.

HoloKat 1w ago 💬 1

That’s what intuition leads to, but im not so certain. Simple life is probably abundant but complex, or even - intelligent life, might be extremely rare.

wymike 1w ago

Seems likely, so many opportunities for us not to have got this far.