this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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The incomprehensible enormity of the universe. There are about 100,000 million stars just in the Milky Way galaxy. Two trillion galaxies lie in the observable universe. Based on Hubble ST observations, an estimated 6.25×10^18 stars have planets. If there is only a 1 in 1 billion chance of these planets supporting life, that's still 6.25 billion planets. Of course we haven't observed life outside earth yet despite such an high probability of it existing—that's the Fermi Paradox. But anyway it is fairly widely accepted that life didn't just evolve here on earth. When other life evolved is another question. Also there's no guarantee we could detect it with telescopes (of any EM spectrum).
I'll give you that the existance of simple life such as microbes is pretty widely accepted. But the existance of intelligent life besides us is absolutely NOT a statistical certainty.
The likelyhood of the circumstances that allowed us to exist repeating is simply that small.
Besides, there is the matter of time. No matter how many planets are out there, you need a fuck ton of time to get to intelligent life.
It took earth about 4 billion years to go from a heaping ball of fire to having humans in it. That's almost 1/3 of the age of the fucking universe!
It doesn't matter how many planets with life there are if they didn't exist for long enough to reach the point we're at.
It's not "fairly widely accepted". The Fermi Paradox is based on the Drake Equation, which has a long chain of assumptions about how rare it is for life to form and grow. Life can easily be a one-off in general, since we don't have good ranges for those measurements.
Our planet is perfect for life to form and, as far as we know, it only happened once here in billions of years.
Given how life started on earth almost immediately after it cooled down it is fairly widely accepted that there’s life out there. What level of complexity is up for debate. Also, if the universe is infinite and the laws of physics are the same everywhere, there is a 100% chance that there is an infinite number of exact replicas of earth and its history out there.
It's not "fairly widely accepted" because there's literally no evidence for it. Anything can happen once. Something happening once is not evidence of how common it is. For that, you need to count how often it happens. We have only the vaguest ideas about how common certain requirements are, and less information about potential hurdles.
That's the point of the Fermi Paradox: if the Drake Equation estimates are right, we should see life everywhere in the universe. The fact that we see no life indicates that our assumptions are wrong.
It is incredibly arrogant to think that in something as unfathomably large as our the universe that humans are the only form of life.
Whether other life forms are advanced enough to be detected by us or even for space travel is an entirely different matter.