And you can not see that I’m concentrating on B.
One more thing, I still have no idea what formula you propose to use, GIGObuster. If you could elaborate on the math involved and the reasoning behind it, I might become less confused.
Well, that is not the focus I was concentrating with, I also agree with what you say here. The problem was affirming that we had can not conclude anything, not quite. I guess I need to mention that the conclusion is not the problem but the refusal to check if the probabilities (that should change those conclusions) are affected by new discoveries.
Well, to clarify further the beef I had is that some were posting as if a formula and the reasons to dismiss new evidence as meaningless were already agreed upon.
Even the Drake equation was not supposed to be a law, it was supposed to be just a guideline like even Drake mentioned.
But as that equation is being mentioned a lot I think it should be taken into account but with a huge modification: All the parts of the equation dealing with intelligent life and civilizations should be dropped as AFAICR those items in the equation are truly controversial or with less support. Or I should say, that is not what most of the research on astrobiology is focused on, and SETI was/is not effective or doing it wrong regarding intelligent life out there so far.
But the Drake equation is totally worthless: most of its factors are pure speculation and the f[sub]l[/sub] factor is the one we are trying to solve, not N. So you’d have to reformulate (ist this the correct term in English?) the equation – which is simple, of course, but doesn’t help you at all, even if you discard some factors because a) we still don’t have any numbers for f[sub]p[/sub] and n[sub]e[/sub] that lead to = Planets with life and b) have no experimental or observational evidence that the factors involved are sufficient to come to such a conclusion in the first place.
The fact that we have not yet observed the spontanous occurrence of life under controlled conditions rather indicates that we miss something: either in the elements involved or the processes or their succession or the time it needs or some combination of reasons.
So, we can’t even tell right now, what conditions need to be fulfilled for life to plop into existence – as I said before, we don’t even know for sure if life on earth actually started here, so we can’t say with certainty that the conditions of the young earth were sufficient – we only know that those conditions were suitable for life to exist, to multiply and to evolve.
With so little knowledge, how can anyone talk with confidence about probabilities?
I don’t mean to say that we will stay as clueless as we are today, but right now, we are.
nevermind
What do you mean? You keep ascribing A to people, not B, and you keep arguing against A, not B.
It’s trivially obvious that the observed existence of earthlike planets increases the probability of extraterrestrial life. Who do you think is disagreeing with this?
But if the other factors that go into the probability calculation are miniscule enough, then the amount by which the observed existence of earthlike planets raises the probability of extraterrestrial life is so insignificant as to be not worth mentioning.
Blake and others are arguing that for all we know, the other factors are extremely miniscule. (And for all we know, they’re not. We just don’t know.)
Therefore, they conclude, validly, that for all we know the observed existence of earthlike planets doesn’t raise the probability of extraterrestrial life to any meaningful extent (and for all we know, it does. We just don’t know.)
Let’s pretend the probability of life arising on an Earthlike planet is 1 in 10^87, to reuse a random number that Blake was fond of.
We already know that there are ~10^11 stars in our galaxy. If planet formation was extremely rare, like was often speculated in the past, it might be that most stars had no planets, and so there might have been only 10^8 “earthlike” planets in our galaxy. But now we know that planets are pretty common, and so we can guess there’s something like 10^10 or even 10^11 “earthlike” planets in our galaxy. So that improves our odds by a factor of 1000–instead of 1 star in a thousand having planets, we can guess that close to all of them have planets. And so the odds of finding a planet with life in our galaxy improves from 1 in 10^79 to 1 in 10^76!
Even though it improves our odds of finding a planet with life by a factor of 1000, it still doesn’t improve our chances by that much, because with those odds the stars will grow cold before we’re likely to find such a planet.
Of course, if the odds of finding life on a suitable planet turn out to be 1 in 10, or 9 in 10, then discovering that there are lots of planets is a very hopeful sign. But improving the odds a thousand-fold isn’t much help unless the odds are really good in the first place. Yeah, you’re a thousand times more likely to win the lottery if you buy 1000 tickets rather than one. But buying a thousand tickets doesn’t make it likely that you’ll win the lottery. MORE likely, yes, but still not likely.
Historically Fl depends on the number of systems out there that will have 2 planets capable of developing life.
So once again, no planets: no way to go up. The original estimation was that if one gets to find a system were 2 planets are capable of getting life then:
Of course that is a big assumption, but the pessimistic estimates gave this:
meaning that we are most likely alone. (Of course intelligent life out there is not the focus of astrobiology so that is why I dope it from the discussion)
The latest news is that, yes, planets are common.
So once again, I do question why some think it is odd to not give better odds when new planets are being found.
(Of course intelligent life out there is not the focus of astrobiology so that is why I **drop **it from the discussion)
Correcting that, and I do question if we are not capable of making better estimates with the information currently available and I do think it is more reckless to not make any effort with the information available. For all I know researchers in the field are not stopping just because some think so.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/02/how-many-intelligent-civilisat.html
And notice that I’m not thinking of Intelligent life, the possibilities then of just simple life forms out there are better than the number of civilizations.
Posts 228 and 229.
These directly contradict the idea that anyone here is saying what you’re saying they’re saying.
We’re all saying that yes, more planets equals raised odds, but no, this doesn’t mean it’s particularly likely that there is extraterrestrial life out there.
Hey, no problems then. 
I’ll let the researchers do their speculation and research regardless if some say that it is not particularly likely that there is extraterrestrial life out there.
Thought you guys might enjoy this…
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_hodgman_s_brief_digression.html