It would be an inconceivably-massive statistical anomaly if they didn’t. But I think a better question is will we ever make contact, and I think the answer to that is that it’s inconceivably improbable.
I’m not convinced statistics can be used like this on big questions where we know so little. Just because we believe the universe to be massively large and ever expanding doesn’t satisfy the basic premise that underlies the assumption that there is so much stuff that some of the stuff must be alive. I don’t think we know enough about the universe to make the assumption that because it is so big, it must be infinitely variable.
But what do I know, I’m just some idiot on the internet.
It’s really moot anyway, imo. Because of the vastness of the universe, the distances involved, and the timeframes involved for traveling those distances and that vastness, the rest of the universe could be teeming with alien life and we’ll likely never know it. Not in our lifetimes.
We absolutely can use statistics like that because we already know that the variables for life to exist MUST exist because we do. There are 100 billion planets in our galaxy, and 200 billion galaxies out there. The chance that our planet is the ONLY one that had the conditions for life to form would be infinitesimally small.
It would be an inconceivably-massive statistical anomaly if they didn’t. But I think a better question is will we ever make contact, and I think the answer to that is that it’s inconceivably improbable.
I’m not convinced statistics can be used like this on big questions where we know so little. Just because we believe the universe to be massively large and ever expanding doesn’t satisfy the basic premise that underlies the assumption that there is so much stuff that some of the stuff must be alive. I don’t think we know enough about the universe to make the assumption that because it is so big, it must be infinitely variable.
But what do I know, I’m just some idiot on the internet.
It’s really moot anyway, imo. Because of the vastness of the universe, the distances involved, and the timeframes involved for traveling those distances and that vastness, the rest of the universe could be teeming with alien life and we’ll likely never know it. Not in our lifetimes.
We absolutely can use statistics like that because we already know that the variables for life to exist MUST exist because we do. There are 100 billion planets in our galaxy, and 200 billion galaxies out there. The chance that our planet is the ONLY one that had the conditions for life to form would be infinitesimally small.