How can you see "the existence of life on other planets is extremely probable" when we've only been able to prove the...

How can you see "the existence of life on other planets is extremely probable" when we've only been able to prove the existence of life on one planet.

With that sample size we can only say "life exists on planet(s)" but we cannot extrapolate from this at all.

It is mathematically retarded to say anything about the likelihood of life regardless of how many stars, planets, galaxies, etc. you can prove there are.

If anything the existence of life becomes lower the bigger we find out the universe is, because it's just 1/x where x is the number of planets we discover.

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>If anything the existence of life becomes lower the bigger we find out the universe is, because it's just 1/x where x is the number of planets we discover.
The fuck?

1 is the planets we discovered life on, x is the amount of planets we discovered total.

just because we discovered a planet, it doesn't mean there isn't life there

it would be still in the bacteria phase

If life exists in one planet that proves that the universe as a whole has the capability of supporting life, just maybe not everywhere.

If the universe has the capability of supporting life and is really fucking vast like holy shit fuck fuck of the fuck, then what could logically stop you from arguing that life could exist somewhere else.

This. We don't even know how hard it is for life to start.

Maybe the chances are literally
1/(total number of planets)

The one bearing earth

You must be geniuinely retarded.

i wonder wat would happen lol

well, at least you aren't /pol/ posting.

Not an argument.

In the one planet we've studied exhaustively, we've discovered life. We haven't studied any other planet exhaustively yet to conclude the presence of life there, so to date our sample gives us a 100% existance of life.

Sun made out of igneous rock and steam.

The extrapolation of that data is that 100% of planets have life on them.

My sun made out of paper beats your sun.

Well this is an extrapolation and opinion thread right?

Q: If you come across a car driving along a functional road on an unexplored island, what is the likelihood of cars populating the rest of the island?

A: Rather likely.

The thinking goes along the line of: life seems to have been borne out of naturally occurring cosmic and terrestrial conditions. There is no good reason to suspect that these conditions are somehow divine, or unique. Given the sheer scale of the universe, we can expect that these conditions are likely to arise not once but many times. In some cases, these conditions successfully give rise to life.

It's mathematically retarded to say anything based on the current data we have is the point.

A car is very complex though. If you went to an island and saw a bird you would expect there to be more birds on the island because you are aware of evolution and have plenty of examples of where there's one there's many. We can also trace back the origin of all life we know of to an origin on Earth. In terms of life on planets we have only a single planet and so far haven't discovered any other planets with life on them. Where there's one, there still only one using the data we have.

Maybe if you're mentally retararded, like yourself. But we can make a good scientific estimate based on these facts:

>life on Earth is based entirely on the most common elements in the Universe
>the Kuiper belt is full of bodies which contain water, simple proteins and carbohydrates showing those requirements are also very common
>planets are very common
>as are stars
>the universe is effectifely infinite
>life has been proven to exist at least once

Taking these into account, you'd have to be obtuse or some kind of irrational religious person to conclude that life is somehow magic and miraculous.

You're right, all of those things are very common, up until your last point. Life has not proven to be very common at all. We only have 1 origin point discovered so far. Why would you just assume that a single source of life makes it common? It could be 1 in a googolplex, the reason we discovered this source can be explained by the anthropic principle.

I think if you consider an infinite or extremely large universe, it obviously becomes probable.

But the more interesting question is, is there life within the region of space that can reasonably interact with us and vice versa, e.g. assuming only travel at some fraction of light speed.

And I think in that case, people overestimate the probability at least for intelligent life, because they ignore observer selection effects. The exact conditions needed can be almost arbitrarily continent on the initial conditions of our local universe, i.e. coincidence.

*contingent

>infinite or extremely large universe
These are completely different things. In an infinite universe I would agree there is 100% chance there is life elsewhere, but we have no proof that the universe is infinite, and our single source of life which we discovered because it happened doesn't tell us anything about how common it is. It does not matter how big a universe is if it is finite because we don't know how common life is.

But life is exceedingly common here, it exists even deep under the rock strata all the way up to the rarified atmosphere. And it has done so all the way back that we can measure. The oldest trace zircons have evidence of early life during the bombardment.

Take your godfag shit elsewhere you fucking retard.

Yes it all evolved from a single source. Life on Earth counts as 1 out of x. We don't know what x, and it's illogical to guess at what it could be.

>god
nobody said anything about god m8

That life originated from one common ancestor, and intelligence evolved only once.

It remains a sample size of 1.

>A car is very complex though
You're autistic

Yes, I should have written "finite but large enough" instead of "extremely large".

That still doesn't make sense though because we don't know how common life is.

I feel like you don't understand this, but all life on Earth started from a single origin. Just because there is diverse life on Earth doesn't make it more common than if there wasn't. It still only counts as 1. That's why the "if you go to an island and see complex life do you think there is other life there?" argument is retarded. Diverse life evolved over a long period of time, with many generations, so of course you would expect there to be more. You can't just say it's the same as multiple origins of life, because we have only discovered 1 so far. Your analogy actually backfires when you realize this.

>That still doesn't make sense though because we don't know how common life is.
We don't have to know for it to make sense. We know that the probability is above zero. Given any probability of life > 0 per volume of space, we can imagine a finite but large enough universe that we almost certainly have other life in it.

You can only imagine a universe that makes it probable if you also imagine up a probability for life. It's easier to of course just make the universe infinite and make it 100%.

But there's no reason to think that life is probable or unprobable based on our current data about the universe. That doesn't stop people from saying how probable it is though.

Given any finite Universe, we can have a probability >0, that we are alone.

>Yes it all evolved from a single source

Prove it.

>That life originated from one common ancestor
Prove it.
>and intelligence evolved only once
Prove it.

>It remains a sample size of 1.

www2.jpl.nasa.gov/snc/nasa1.html

In your opinion.

Even if you believe the "life started on Mars" meme it's still only one origin point.

>life is magic

That's why I wrote "probable" and not "certain".

>shifting the goalposts
>scare quotes

>paper beats steam

This is why Donald Trump can run for president.

Said literally nobody in this thread. Nice meme. :)

>You can only imagine a universe that makes it probable if you also imagine up a probability for life.
Yes, but that doesn't change anything since for any probability > 0 there's some large enough finite universe that other life is arbitrarily probable.

You can define it as a function if you want. The more improbable life is per volume of space, the bigger the volume has to be for other life to exist with a certain probability.

And yes, it is perfectly possible that the probability may be small enough that this needed volume is much larger than our Hubble volume.

Yeah it's possible.

Man I feel bad for people like OP who are still at that level of denial. It's understandable though as reality is so incredible as to be impossible to believe if you're simply told about it.

Yeah life is mechanical, only consciousness is magic

It seems you're the one in denial. By the way I'm an atheist if that's what you're trying to hint at.

You can't even accept that life is common in the cosmos, let alone consciousness. That's not even denial that's pure stubbornness.

But the fact that your viewpoint is the norm, namely that the sum total of consciousness in the cosmos exists here, is absolutely horrifying.

Are you illiterate? I didn't say it's common or uncommon, I said it's dumb to say either.

>Product of US education system detected.

>If anything the existence of life becomes lower the bigger we find out the universe is, because it's just 1/x where x is the number of planets we discover.

>what is math

I know, right. Just to explain for the benefit of everyone else: no matter how many planets we discover, the chance is always 50% because there are only two possibilities.

Either you define it as only thoroughly searched planets, in which the chance of life is 100% on every planet, or you define it as amount of planets we discovered, in which it's 1/x where x is the amount of planets we've discovered. Either way it's dumb to extrapolate.