... earthlings are the most intelligent creatures in the entire universe?
Duh!
Monsignor Pope Ping!
Yes it does.
I would say he left out #13 (which really should be #1) - God would have to decide to create life on those other planets, since life can’t just “happen” by itself.
That point makes the rest of these statistical arguments rather moot.
I agree with him. Since we are here, life elsewhere certainly is possible. However, it’s highly improbable.
Just one of many facts to consider: the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but it took almost 4 billion years for life to appear on land, even though Earth is friendly to life.
There is a video on youtube that starts out with a pic of a mountain in India maybe then slowly pans out to around 13 BILLION light years away.
yea the odds of us being the only sentient beings are pretty slim...
Gee, it is as if someone intentionally designed the perfect planet for life.
Of course it’s just us. Just look at the Bible. It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Qiuznorx.
There could be 10+ billion earth like clones out there and it would still be unique.
Bookmark
“As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”
- Freeman Dyson
Yet we will continue to be inundated constantly, even here on FreeRepublic, with new “science” reports claiming to have discovered another “earth-like” planet somewhere in the universe.
But almost always those reports contain findings of planets - light years away and observable only with far distant reading astronomical instruments - that the “scientists” and their reporters refer to as “earth-like” merely with barely one or two valiables that proximate such measures for earth - such as inhabiting a “habitable” zone of a star and the size of the planet.
But:
1. Orbiting a star with sufficient “metallicity,” necessary for the formation of terrestrial rather than gaseous planets?
2. Orbiting a star that is orbiting a “habitable zone” within a galaxy, and not closer to the center of a galaxy, where radiation and the presence of wandering planetoids make life there unlikely?
3. Orbiting a sun that is in a disk-shaped spiral galaxy rather than in an elliptical (spheroid) galaxy?. Spiral galaxies are thought to be the only type capable of supporting life.
4. Orbiting around a star in an almost perfect circle (like earth days) rather than the more common “eccentric” (elongated) ellipse? Steep elliptical orbits take a planet relatively close to and then relatively far from a sun, with great consequences for warmth and light. Earth’s stable, nearly circular orbit around the sun keeps our distance from it relatively constant, and hence the amount of heat and light does not vary tremendously.
5. Orbiting in a star system with outer massive gas planets (like Jupiter and Saturn) that can attract and catch many wandering asteroids and comets and generally keep them from hitting planets closer to the star (like with Earth)?
6. Orbiting in a solar system with asteroid belts that also keep a lot of destructive flying rock in a stable orbit and away from other planets?
7. A planet with a molten core that creates a magnetic field that holds radiation belts in place; belts that protect the surface of a planet (like Earth) from the most harmful rays of it’s star?
8. A planet with ongoing volcanism that plays a role in generating an atmosphere, and together with seismic and plate tectonic activity is cycling rich minerals widely?
9. Orbiting just the right kind of star, putting out a fairly steady amount of energy? Other types of stars are more variable in their output and this variance can utterly destroy life or cause it to be unsustainable due to the extremes.
10. A planet with a fairly rapid rotation (like erth) that reduces the daily variation in temperature and also makes photosynthesis viable because there is enough sunlight all over the planet?
11. A planet tilted on its just enough relative to its orbital plane to allow seasonal variations that help complex life, but not so tilted as to make those variations too extreme (like earth)?
12. A planet with a moon that causes tides that are just strong enough to permit tidal zones (a great breeding ground for diverse life) but not so severe as to destroy life?
Do these often “we found anothter ‘earth-like planet’ “ reports refer to what all really makes a planet “earth-like”?
No. They are all click bait seeking groupies from which they can tell their advertisers that their ads are worth it.
It would be hard for me to imagine earth being the only planet capable of supporting life.
The way the scientists talk you would think they know the universe from a to z but i believe the truth is that they really know very little.
The Bible tells us that God has no beginning and no end, if we are the only ones who has ever been here then what has God been doing for eternity?
The Bible tells us that God is for the living which tells me that man has been living some where for much longer than what they have been here, they were most likely some where else.
Earth is uncommon, but it’s essentially impossible to prove that it’s unique in having intelligent life.
One of the most impressive lectures I remember from elementary physics was the description of how Maxwell's equations applied to electromagnetic waves derived a propagation velocity for the waves which somewhat unexpectedly turned out to be virtually indistinguishable from the speed of light. These calculations provided very convincing evidence that "light" was an electromagnetic wave.
In this article we are expected to believe that a rigorous calculation of the probability of finding other life in the universe is approximately 50%.
Think about that for a moment.
Imagine the coincidence of multiplying a dozen or so extremely large or extremely small probabilities together and just coincidentally getting a product which is anywhere near the value "1" (as is the case with a probability of 53%, for example).
If any of the factors making up the product were uncertain by a factor of 100, then that factor alone could cause the resulting product to vary from a low of 0.01 to a high of 100. I doubt very seriously that the combination of factors which make up the Drake Equation are sufficiently well known to ascertain that the probability of finding other life in the universe can be thought of as equivalent to a coin flip. It's much more likely that the incertainties in such a calculation would span many, many orders of magnitude.
There would be three possible outcomes I might expect.
One would be that there is a wide range of probabilities but that the entire range is one of very tiny numbers.
The second possible outcome is quite the opposite; that is, the entire range consists of very large numbers; indicating that the probability is almost certain.
The final possible outcome would be that the range of results goes from the very tiny to the very large; indicating that we are quite uncertain whether there is little chance of other life or whether there is almost certainly other life.
I’ve never believed in space aliens. After I became a Christian I doubled down on that belief because when you look at His creation no two things are alike: not leaves on a tree, not one blade of grass is like another, no two stars are duplicates, no two fingerprints are the same. So why would He duplicate our beautiful Earth? He’s not in the business of xeroxing anything including mankind.
Seems like all this is based on the one example of life we know about, us. I mean we can extrapolate the conditions and parameters that allow our type of life to exist, but how can you then say with such assurance all life must have these conditions? We have exactly one example—no one can extrapolate much from one example and claim this must apply everywhere. It could very well apply everywhere, but no one can know for sure until and if we ever find other examples.
Freegards