OneGoodLeg wrote:
ThisIsIt wrote:
Fleck wrote:
I find stuff like this extraordinarily fascinating. It's doubtful that much will come from this in my life-time other than knowing a few more details, but when you starting thinking bigger about things like this - how truly bigger the universe is and what the potential is for find some other form of "life", possibly even intelligent life like us, it's definitely a possibility and somewhat daunting!
. . . but . . those emails! :)
I guess given the sheer numbers of stars and planets out there it's probably a statistical certainty that some other sort of self-aware intelligent life is out there but....
It took the better part of 3 billion years for multi-cellular life to evolve from single celled organism and then another 600 million years for something smarter than an ape to come along, and then a couple hundred thousand years for that one-off species to develop the cultural knowledge to understand and contemplate space travel. So at least in the n of 1 we know about some species like us appears to be exceedingly rare and even for 99% of our existence even with our brain power it didn't lead to the science/technology to understand the workings of the universe.
Ah, but that still just boils down to a math problem in the end.... You may be presenting a super tiny fraction, but if you multiply it by a big enough numerator, then the probability is no longer tiny, or even fractional.
Yeah but we don't know the probability of two significant "state changes" occurring because all we have is an n of 1 here on earth. I would argue both are probably very rare given of the billion upon billions of species that have existed each (as far as we know) has only occurred once; multi-cellular life and language.