Bwah hah hah hah hah hah.
First he claims that he did the calculations, and we can look at the equations he used.
Then there aren’t any equations.
Does anybody believe this dude on this subject? Because if not I can retire knowing that ignorance has been successfully fought.
Actually, the Fermi Paradox pretty much tells us that we are alone in the universe and only the planet Earth has life.
“The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.”
This is it, folks! There is nobody else out there.
The universe does not contain any intelligent life at all.
.
Actually, I would have made that generalization. Are there species wherein some members, at some point in their life cycle, have kidneys, and other members don’t?
That may be good reasoning, but it wasn’t my reasoning. My reasoning was “Members of species, being very closely related to each other, share gross anatomical structures. So since this thing has a heart (at this stage in its development etc…) almost certainly every other member of its species has a heart (at that stage in development etc…).”
The justification for that first sentence involves some generalizations from large samples, to be sure. But that’s beside the point. My reasoning–and it’s good reasoning, as I’ll explain in a moment–did not have the form of a generalizations like this: “Members of class X usually have hearts, this thing is a member of class X, so this thing has a heart.” Rather, my reasoning started with a single sample, and from that single sample drew a conclusion about an entire population.
I didn’t follow the latter line of reasoning because, without understanding the relationship between species membership and evolutionary descent, I don’t really have a good (naturalistic) basis for drawing conclusions about what organs members of species have. I’d have no good (naturalistic) basis for assuming you have a heart.
A parallel example:
John is trustworthy, and I know this. He tells me all the balls in the silo are the same color. The silo is full of balls. I draw one out; it’s red. I conclude, correctly and justifiedly, that all the balls in the silo are red. One member in the sample, with a justified generalization to an entire population.
How do I know John is trustworthy? Probably from a large sample of past experiences with him. But that’s beside the point–I didn’t say that there is ever any reasoning that relies on no large sample at any point. Rather, I said that there is some good reasoning that involves a generalization from a sample of one to a large population. That’s what happened in the ball/silo case, and it’s what happens (IMO, and I recognize your expertise, but on the other hand I do think I sometimes understand the basis for others’ reasoning better than they themselves do! Sometimes!) in the case of new species (with caveats about life cycles, gender differences, etc, of course).
Dio, why bother to post untrue statements when anybody interested can quote where you specifically said that you were talking about the probabilities of life arising?
Emphasis mine of course.
Dio, there is no point making untrue statements in this forum. We can all read what you wrote. You were not talking about planets with conditions analogous to earth. You were talking about the probability of life arising. And you said that that probability was lower than my figure of 1/10^87.
I ask
FOR THE FOURTEENTH TIME IN THIS THREAD.
Since this is GQ, can you please show us the equations that you used to ascertain these probabilities? Because this is GQ, and not the forum for baseless opinions, so you must have calculated such probabilities before declaring what they are smaller than.
FOURTEEN TIMES DIO HAS BEEN ASKED THIS QUESTION.
Do you think it has escaped anybody’s notice that you are running scared and unable to put up?
Heh heh. The Fermi Paradox. Good one.
First of all, “life” does not mean “civilization,” as was pointed out above, many scientists believe that life is more probable to be microbial than complex most of the time it occurs. There afe no “high estimates of the probability of alien civilations.” The assumption is that abiogensis is likely to have occurred more than once. Furthermore, the vast distances of the unverse would make it highly unlikely that we would actually be able to see it outside of our own celestial neighborhood (which is tiny).
I’ve already answered this a bunch of times. The probability is greater than zero. This we know. In order for the probablity to be less than once in auniverse, you would need to show what conditions exist on earth that exist nowhere else in the universe.
You also have not given any basis at all for your own figure other than you want it to be true.
How do you not get that Blake doesn’t have a figure?
Wait…isn’t Sagan’s list and analysis the reason we have to believe that the conditions of Earth could actually be unique? Seems to me that’s precisely the point.
No, my bet is not. Nice evasion though but you couldn’t expect to get away with that here.
You are assuming this is a toss up. That there is no logic to be applied to making a decision.
That is not true.
We KNOW there is at least one planet with life on it in the universe. So, we know it can happen.
You can either attribute that to magic (i.e. God made it happen) or you can attribute it to a confluence of natural phenomenon that led to life.
If you want to invoke God (i.e. magic) then the discussion is dead. I’ll call it Invisible Pink Unicorns that did it for all the sense that makes and it is as good as invoking the Christian god or any other god you choose.
So, we are left with physical processes that led to life.
Scientists, while not having achieved full blown spontaneous life in a bottle, have done experiments that show the precursors to life can be achieved in what they suspect would be an early earth atmosphere. (cite)
Evolution has been well established and scientists have shown convincingly how life can progress from simple life forms to more complex ones. (cite)
We know there are around 100-500 billion galaxies in the universe. (cite)
There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. (cite)
The number of planets is harder to determine but so far they do not seem uncommon. So far nearly 500 planets outside our solar system have been detected. (cite) Given the difficulty of this task that is remarkable. It is now boring news no one takes note of when another is found. They even found what they think is the first Goldilocks planet which could, in theory, have liquid water on it. (cite)
As I showed earlier life exists on this planet in some pretty unlikely and, to us, hostile places. Indeed it thrives there suggesting life is pretty tenacious and adaptable. (cite my earlier post upthread)
So, assuming physical processes and chance are involved (i.e. not god) then life in the universe is a cosmic dice roll.
We know it happened once. Do we have reason to suspect we are unusually blessed with just the right planet with just the right distance from its star with just the right chemistry such that the odds of life forming are staggeringly small?
No, we have no reason to think we are blessed with an insanely unlikely planet that nothing like it exists in a universe of quintillion or sextillion or whatever stars.
Even if the odds are long they have to be REALLY long make it happen only once in the whole of creation. It is not just the number of stars either. It is sextillions of stars existing for millions to billions of years and having their systems evolve then dying and creating new systems that exist millions or billions of years to evolve.
Imagine I have a 100 sided die. The die is loaded such that the #1 comes up 99% of the time. The other 99 numbers come up 0.01% of the time. I asked you to make a bet and you likened that to a 50/50 chance on a rooster fight.
Can we “know” which number will occur on that die roll? Nope. No one can. It is unknowable.
If I asked you to bet money on the next roll where would you place your bet?
Eagerly awaiting the next dodge.
No. Sagan’s conditions would occur billions of times.
Why? Based on what? Where is this conclusion coming from? I haven’t seen anything anywhere that supports such a conclusion. Because it happened one time, it does not follow it would happen even one additional time.
I mean… there was a human being named John Fitzgerald Kennedy who became the President of a country called the United States of America, and he visited the state of Texas in that country, in the city of Dallas, and he passed by a book repository where a man named Lee Harvey Oswald was waiting with a gun to shoot him, and he did, leading to his brains landing on his wife’s pink suit, which she continued to wear throughout the following hours, even as a man named Lyndon Johnson, who was from that same state, took the oath of office and became president.
All those things happened once.
Does that mean that given billions upon billions of worlds and years…they are bound to happen again?
Because that’s ridiculous.
BRAAAP! Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Cynic, it looks as though you won’t be going on to our bonus round!
There are certainly species where some have one kidney. some have six and any numbers in between.
The problem with that is that it isn’t true, so the premise fails.
Even In humans the number of muscles varies by up to 14 between individuals. already noted, many insects have winged and wingless forms, neotenic amphibians retain gills as adults, many dogs lack the first digit on either forlegs or both legs and so on and so forth. We can add to that list by looking at animals with congenital defects such as those born with two heads
It simply isn’t true to say that individuals of the same species share gross anatomical structures at the same life stage. Many do, but there are countless counter-examples. The only way that it is true is if you look at invariant anatomical structures whose modification threatens survival. But how can you tell what is an invariant anatomical structures whose modification threatens survival when you only have one type specimen. If you pick up a neotenic salamander, do you proclaim that all adult female salamanders must have gills? After all gills are a pretty gross anatomical structure, and they sure seem like they are necessary for survival. But most adult salamanders don’t have gills. What if you pick a two headed adult snake? Can you conclude from that that all snakes of that species have two heads?
Your reasoning simply doesn’t work when you only have a single sample.
Yes, but your reasoning is both logically invalid (a hasty induction) and will produce erroneous results much of the time. That hardly contradicts the statistical law that says that you need more than one degree of freedom for meaningful prediction.
Once again, you are just extrapolating from prior samples. How does John know what the ball colour is? Because John looked at them, thereby sampling the entire population. There’s nothing wrong with using data collected by other observers for your analysis, especially when the observer is reliable, as John is. However doing this does not mean that you have accurately predicted form the single sample. In this case it means is that you have used a sample size equal to the population size. That’s a great way to get accurate predictions.
Once again, it’s trivially easy to prove that you are doing this by telling you that John never got to see the balls before they were added. Now tell me what colour the rest of the balls are? If the technique actually worked then you would not need to be able to include Johns observations to get an accurate result. The fact that you can’t do it when we remove John’s observations but keep all other factors identical proves that it is John’s observations that are producing your results, not any other part of the technique.
It would seem to flatly contradict centuries of both of formal logic and statistics if it did. Modus ponens works, but you need some rational basis for “When A then B” first. From a single sample of A you can’t conclude B in any logical manner.
extremophiles The fact that life can thrive in horribly unfriendly conditions on earth extends the equations. Life exists in underwater volcanic vents without oxygen and in incredibly cold places. It exists under heavy pressures and in steam vents.
Based on our ability to extropolate from our own observable galaxy and from the sheer number of stars in the universe.
I am not referring to Dio specifically to the exclusion of others when I tell you that relying on the fact that the words are plain, written, and readily referred to could easily lead you to enormous frustration. To my everlasting astonishment and consternation, that reality does not in any way whatsoever faze those who choose to ignore it.
I know. Bizarre. And irritating as hell. It sucks up crazy amounts of time and effort pointing it out to people.
Really? How do you know this?
Um, no. It’s like buying 300 billion lottery tickets. A whole bunch will probably be winners even though the odds are high.
Also, will you please stop acting like a crazy jackass with your LARGE-ASS CRAZY FONT?
This argues that we are somehow “special”.
A cornerstone of cosmology is that we hold no unique place in the universe.
As I noted above scientists have made the precursors necessary for life in a bottle by replicating what they think early conditions on earth were like.
To suppose this happened only here, on earth, is to suppose a stunning and staggeringly unlikely series of events happened here.
Consider one sextillion stars. I’ll write that out for you:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
And remember those stars have finite lifetimes. They will burnout, die and new stars will form so the number is even bigger.
In all that you think we are special?
Science suggests, strongly, that we have no reason to think we are special. That what happens here happens nowhere else is absurd.
Nobody disputes that it is greater than zero. We all agree that it is greater than zero. We have all, always agreed that it was greater than zero. 1/10^87 is greater than zero.
OK, do you understand that now? Can you stop repeating what we all agree on and has never been under dispute? Nobody asked whether it was greater than zero.
How the hell does that follow? How is that not a total nonsequitur?
Let’s *assume hypothetically *that the probability on any given planet is 1/10^87. That is the probability on all planets, 0n any planet. On any given planet. That includes Earth. Earth is not special in any way. It is exactly like all other planets in that regard. The probability of life arising on Earth is not special. In fact it is identical to every other planet in the entire universe, and that probability is 1/10^87. There are no conditions that exist in Earth that don’t exist elsewhere. Earth is totally unremarkable. It has exactly the same probability as life arising, and that probability is 1/10^87.
Now please explain to us why I need to explain why Earth is special when I have been consistently arguing that Earth is identical to every other planet and in no way special?
And you still haven’t answered my question. you said that you knew that the figure was higher than 1/10^87. You didn’t say it was non-zero. You said it was higher than 1/10^87. You also said that you had calculated this figure and that we could see the calculations.
FOR THE FIFTEENTH TIME IN THIS THREAD.
Since this is GQ, can you please show us the equations that you used to ascertain these probabilities? Because this is GQ, and not the forum for baseless opinions, so you must have calculated such probabilities before declaring what they are smaller than.
FIFTEEN TIMES DIO HAS BEEN ASKED THIS QUESTION.
I don’t have a figure. never did have one. I have always argued that the figure could be anywhere from 1/10^87 to 1, and any figure in that range has exactly the same chance of being correct.
You however do have a figure. You have stated as fact that the figure is >1/10^87.
FOR THE SIXTEENTH TIME IN THIS THREAD.
Since this is GQ, can you please show us the equations that you used to ascertain these probabilities? Because this is GQ, and not the forum for baseless opinions, so you must have calculated such probabilities before declaring what they are smaller than.
SIXTEEN TIMES DIO HAS BEEN ASKED THIS QUESTION.
I think this argument has become entirely too contentious for GQ. However, I don’t want to just toss a thread that has developed this much animosity into GD. Therefore, I’m requesting anyone interested in continuing the subject to start a new thread in that forum.
A couple of points:
Blake, it’s unnecessary and annoying to post in such large font. If a poster is not answering your questions, it’s OK to just note that and move on.
Diogenes, it’s not suitable for GQ to simply make the same assertion over and over again. If you can’t actually answer poster’s questions, you should either admit this or not reply at all.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator