LogFAQs > #880560565

Lootman posted...

Ogurisama posted...

Lets say
1/1,000,000 planetary bodies have the right conditions to sustain life

1/1,000,000 will get life, and then 1/1,000,000 will get intelligent life after that, even with ose numbers life should be fairly common

Thats with made up numbers though

This is the real problem.

Every argument that is predicated on the idea of "There are so many planets in the universe, there must be tons that are capable of supporting life, therefore the odds are high that at least a few of them support life" is inherently flawed, because we have literally NO idea what the odds of life actually developing ARE, nor what the odds are of that life evolving to anything resembling sentience, or that evolving to a point of any level of technology or civilization, nor space-faring, nor the average "half-life" of any advanced civilization, etc.

So things like the Drake Equation are fine as a thought experiment to consider what aspects are necessary for extraterrestrial life to exist, but the moment you start plugging numbers into those variables and start spitting out answers you're pretty much objectively wrong.

We simply don't know enough to make definitive statements. It's possible that the odds of life evolving are so astronomically infinitesimal that WE shouldn't even exist. It's possible that life is relatively common, but spread out so far that it would be incredibly unlikely to ever actually run INTO another alien race (which is the flip side of the "there are a lot of planets in space" coin). It's also possible that life is such a common thing that there's secretly an alien federation out there just waiting for us to develop space flight and make First Contact.

It's even possible that sociological factors result in most advanced civilizations going into "hiding" soon after developing advanced technology, meaning they'd become undetectable even if they WERE there and close enough to "see". Or that the age of the universe and the amount of time necessary for any form of life to advance to a sapient and technological level of evolution means that even if there will EVENTUALLY be other forms of life, we're still the first race to actually REACH that milestone (SOMEONE has to be first, after all), and thus, still "alone" in the universe right now.

(Hell, maybe some other race is going to eventually evolve, develop space flight, and explore the universe, and WE are going to be THEIR Forerunners/Precursors/Progenitors/Prometheans/Ancients/First Ones/etc., as they find the unexplained ruins we've left behind after we die out.)

There are a LOT of variables involved, and we don't really have numerical values for most of them. Even if we CAN estimate the age of the universe and the potentially likely number of planets in it (which is still just an educated guess), and fudge out the likelihood of any of those planets being capable of supporting life (which is even more hypothetical guesswork), we have literally ZERO knowledge of just how likely the formation and development of life are statistically, nor the likelihood of that life developing beyond the bacterial level, whether "non-carbon" life is even possible, and if so, how it would skew the numbers, and so on.

We can basically sort of half-ass the first half or so of the Drake Equation, but the rest of it is pure guessing.


---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family