Why do so many otherwise "logical" people say that it's likely there is life on other planets?

Why do so many otherwise "logical" people say that it's likely there is life on other planets?

Given the data that we have no one can make that statement. No one knows how rare life is to create, we only know of 1 example of it ever occurring so far.

You can not logical extrapolate from this data no matter how big the universe is. Life could be incredibly rare, the only reason we know of this occurrence is because we're part of it.

It could also be relatively common as well, my point is you cannot actually say anything about it logically.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
m.youtube.com/watch?v=XURasVfPyFk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
twitter.com/AnonBabble

There are ways to estimate probability of something happening other than raw statistical measurement. In this case, the estimates are based on a detailed understanding of biology and biochemistry.

People who describe themselves as logical are usually not very logical.

Also, the average person's opinion on whether there's life out there is worthless. In fact, so is every expert's opinion. Until we know exactly how life appeared on Earth, which we don't yet know, we can't say how likely it is that it appeared on other planets.

No one understands biology and biochemistry to the point of knowing how to create new life from no life.

>Given the data that we have no one can make that statement. No one knows how rare life is to create, we only know of 1 example of it ever occurring so far.

Shit, it's not like we are physically made of 3 out of 4 most abundant substances in the fucking universe or anything, and the sheer retarded number of confirmed terrestrial planets also doesn't matter.
You weren't there, right?
Could be God or sumtin...

None of what you said matters.

Why don't you try to extrapolate and put a percentage on it?

Once you attempt to you'll realize that eventually you'll have to make some guesses or you'll make no progress in your estimation, but your guesses will make your estimation invalid.

Let's say there's a planets, b are similar to earth, c have the materials that make up life on Earth.

None of those are relevant unless we know x, how common life is to create.

But go ahead, try to explain how you can logically deduce a percentage of life occurring on other planets, I'll wait.

50%

It's just a game of probability

also we're going to have to define "life"

self-animated material, or just carbon based forms of it like Earth?

>but your guesses will make your estimation invalid
Nigga, what do you think an estimate IS? "guess" is not the same as "pull numbers out of your ass".

>self-animated material
What does this even mean?

Still waiting for a percentage and an explanation of how you got there.

An estimate would require something to estimate from. If you flip a coin and it lands on heads once, the logical conclusion would be that it lands on heads 100% of the time. Do you see how ridiculous it is to estimate like this?

>our current understanding of the universe is that it is infinite
>as such, there would be infinite planets
>we know that at least one planet contains life as we understand life
>we have a subset larger than zero of an infinite set
>since the set is infinite, the subset must also be
>there are infinite planets with life

;)

are you retarded, son?

I would agree with this if we actually knew the universe was infinite with infinite matter, but we don't. There is a limited amount of energy in the big bang, even if the space is infinite, it is irrelevant.

I like this one

Not an argument.

I added that blinkey face since Poe's law states that you should, or someone might take you seriously.

With my serious face, I think the very notion of aliens is an hopeless endeavor. The distances in space and time are simply too huge.

Why do so many otherwise "logical" people assume that "life on other planets" means intelligent ayyliums? "Life" only has to be something as simple as bacteria, and maybe even less than that. It basically just has to grow and reproduce.

I agree with this, however it's not an argument against OP if that's what it was intended to be.

>Still waiting for a percentage and an explanation of how you got there.
You are not going to get any, for I am not a biologist.

>If you flip a coin and it lands on heads once, the logical conclusion would be that it lands on heads 100% of the time. Do you see how ridiculous it is to estimate like this?
Did you read at all? Because that's exactly how I said this does NOT work.

>the estimates are based on a detailed understanding of biology and biochemistry
>I am not a biologist

100% of earth like planets we've visited have life, those odds are pretty good

>100% of coins flipped only once land on that side every time

Yup, you heard correctly. Apparently a person can understand how biologists do things without being one themselves. Amazing, right?

>No one understands biology and biochemistry to the point of knowing how to create new life from no life.
you don't

I know.

it means chemical reactions giving rise to macro organisms that interact with their environments, presumably to reproduce copies of themselves.

>Why do so many otherwise "logical" people say that it's likely there is life on other planets?
/thread
Doesn't matter if the universe is or isn't infinite, our current accepted evidence says it is and based on that we can argue that almost surely life exists somewhere else in the universe, until some other evidence comes and we understand that the universe is not infinite anymore. But until then, the universe is infinite for all intents and purposes, and somewhere else life is likely to be.

Infinite space and infinite matter are different things. There's nothing to suggest there is infinite matter. The big bang was finite.
>almost surely
>likely
You obviously don't even understand infinite yourself so why are you talking about it?

Organic molecules form in a vacuum. Life is likely. Intelligent life less so. Intelligent life ever existing close enough in time and space to make contact with us, much much less so. But life as we define it is almost certainly elsewhere.

It looks like you are the one that doesn't know what you are talking about.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely
All of these are accepted scientific ideas, and that's why logical people believe in them. Some may even disagree on some, but that is a deviation of the scientific consensus and it's nothing but a belief until proved otherwise.

because pilots and astronauts see ufos all the damn time
because ufos are caught on radar traveling at excessive speeds
>and if you don't care about any of that
because the universe is big
because we exist
because even within our own solar system multiple planets possess water
did I mention how big and old the universe is? pretty sure I did

How do you arrive at almost certainly when you don't know the probability of life occurring?

Once life evolves and leaves the planet, timescales don't matter. It will expand via alleopatric speciation. The argument that it's impossible they are already here is actually rather illogical.

Why do you keep posting the same question when the answer has been posted over and over?

The universe is INFINITE.

This discussion is over.

If aliens don't real, then how do you explain pic related?

Surprised nobody mentioned Drake's equation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

it's completely trivial and useless, but still

there's some crazy shit out there. I can sense it

m.youtube.com/watch?v=XURasVfPyFk

For low tier structural engineers, pyramids are simply the only thing that will remain after a few thousand years.

Life as we know it is made of some the must common elements in the universe.
We have found thousands of earth like planets and we know they're pretty much around every star in the galaxy.
We have found organic materials in multiple places in our solar system alone.

Sure it's not 100% definite PROOF, but if we really are the only life in the universe, it'd find it vastly more shocking than if we aren't.

Much more easily than you arrive at "you cannot say anything about it logically" when the chemical conditions necessary for life are incredibly abundant in an infinite universe.

Because "logical" understand that it's mathematical heavily improbable that life doesn't exist

logical people don't shitpost about ayy lmaos or spend their time talking about unfalsifiable bullshit

It's completely logical that there is life on other planets. It's difficult to comprehend the numbers you're playing with, but reason and logic easily point to ET.

>500 billion stars in the galaxy
>planets orbiting at least 75% of stars
>at least 100 billion galaxies (probably many more)
>billions of years of existence

Even if there isn't life in the universe somewhere else right now, there probably was a billion years ago, or two billion, or seven billion.

It's like when faggots tell me .9 repeating isn't 1.

Can you formalize this mathematically?

The fact we exist means life is possible meaning alien life must exist somewhere in this 92 billion light years expanse of existence.

None of that is relevant when you don't know the probability for life though. You cannot draw probability from a single occurrence. All the numbers you said are irrelevant until you have an idea of probability of life. It maybe be a extremely uncommon thing, and maybe it's difficult for you to comprehend how uncommon something can be.

Example: What is the probability that the universe will be in the exact same state it is now? Basically 0 chance of it ever happening again, however it did happen once. You can't just assume life is common just because it happened once, we don't know the exact cause of life or would be able to recreate it in a lab.

Not that guy but, we have found organic materials in other parts of our solar system alone.

Life as we know it is made of some the most common elements in the universe.

Take that plus the vast scale of the universe, don't you think it's a bit of a stretch, with all of these factors, to just assume only a single, extremely common type of rock developed life?

>"Hey, Cheif Engineer Ooga"
>"Yes, God Emperor Booga?"
>"I want upsies"
>"Alright, we'll build you a big staircase so you can go more upsies than anyone else"
>"But staircase that big fall down"
>"Alright, we build four staircases next to each other so that they can't fall down"
>"Ok"

I think it is is entirely possible even when you consider how precise and complex the conditions for life have to be due to how vast the universe is. Of coarse if it does exist; most would be very low level life.

I'm sure that sentient life even exists somewhere on some planet or moon. It's even possible that sentient life advanced enough to form some form of space travel is also out there.

I don't believe we have ever been visited or ever will though.

Yes it's stupid to assume that, but it's equally stupid to assume life exists elsewhere. You are thinking about it illogically.

The most convincing evidence for the non-existence of aliens is the fact that they haven't yet probed my anus.

Of course it's possible, we exist. My issue is when people say it's probable without thinking about it logically. The vastness of the universe doesn't matter.

The emergence of life seems to be a consequence of synergy given the right boundary conditions. I'm not claiming to have any theoretical evidence but it seems likely that it would emerge more than once given a really, really big universe. Another case of rationally obtained truth, empiricism BTFO.
>create
>life
Lmao no. Life is an emergent property of dynamical systems. We understand abiogenesis enough to understand how life emerges.
I philosophize about that a lot
I'd define life as a system of constraints that produce a mind sensu biosemiosis capable of interpreting and acting within its environment in order to maintain the conditions for life.

OP, you're absolutely right, but you're wasting your time. These people get their pants in a knot whenever anyone challenges the fedora religion

Once my friend was telling me about his aunt's friend who was a pilot and saw an alien in a cockpit on a ufo look right at him when he was flying. His gf then starts freaking out and covering her ears while yelling " I don't believe in that stuff it's not in the bible". This was somebody who was a hard drug addict that regularly had premarital sex and never went to church or knew anything about her claimed religion.

Why is illogical? I look at the factors we know probably has an effect on the emergence of life and if you accept these factors it's pretty logical to assume there's life elsewhere.

Even with the same conditions Earth had when life emerged we don't know how common it is for life to emerge, so you can't extrapolate. You can say things like "life is more likely to exist with these conditions" but you can't say how likely, just relatively likely.

Your argument boils down "but we can't be COMPLETELY SURE so we can't assume ANYTHING"

We can't be completely sure of anything. All we can do is extrapolate the data we have and try to make predictions from that, even if there's a lot we don't know.

So far, the data we have seem to indicate that at least simple life should be somewhat common in the universe. There's a shit ton of data we don't have but until that data is obtained, I'm personally sticking to this conclusion.

1) There's a lot of other planets. Like trillions upon trillions upon trillions of them - cuz there's a whole lotta other galaxies (trillions upon trillions of them), and all observations indicate that planets seem to be the rule for stars, rather than the exception.

2) We've some vague ideas as to the requirements for life. We know that those requirements not only can occur elsewhere, but are more likely to occur more often, and recur more often, in other solar systems. (Short lived yellow dwarves are not the best stars for this around. Red dwarves are, and they are much more common, as well as more likely to have rocky planets.)

3) We're kinda out in the sticks of our own galaxy. There's a lot more potential life sustaining stars towards the core than out here on the rim.

4) The only thing unique about our solar system, is that we are in it. There's nothing otherwise terribly unusual about this solar system.

Ergo, regardless of how rare it might be, there's almost certainly life on other planets. That's the only "logical" conclusion you can come to with the data we have.

Now there's a question as to whether there is any other life in our galaxy, but all the data we do have points to that being quite likely as well.

Intelligent life, as we would recognize it, is quite another bag of dildos however. We maybe the only such in this galaxy, at least. In which case, we may never encounter any such, assuming FTL isn't a thing, which it probably isn't. But when you bring civilizations into the mix, there's a whole lot more unknowns.

I mean we can't say anything with 100% certainty, we don't even know why the damn corona is so hot or what exactly ~90% of the universe is made out of... But given what we do know about so many aspects surrounding this, you can say there is life on other planets with as much certainty as you can make any other unverified claim in science.

What data do we have that indicates life is common?

Earth like planets are extremely common and can be found around most stars.

There's a shit ton of stars out there.

Organic material has been found all over our solar system, indicating it's somewhat common.

Water is pretty common.

We have found loads of planets capable of holding liquid water.

^^All of these are things we know are necessary for the formation of life as we know it.

And most importantly, nothing indicates that our little rock is somehow special in the universe.

Following the mediocrity principle, life should be at least somewhat common.

Not him, but none - but we have some vague ideas of what circumstances are probably required for it to occur, and somewhat less vague ideas as to what conditions are required for it to be maintained, and further we know these circumstances occur elsewhere, in some cases, likely for longer and even more favorably.

Life isn't made up of any materials that aren't common throughout the universe and the circumstances required to sustain it, aren't terribly unique.

More importantly, there's so many worlds out there, that even if life is so rare that it only occurs on, to use layman span, on "0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%" of solar systems, then there'd still be billions and billions of solar systems sustaining life out there.

There's just no logical way, given the data we have, to claim that there's no other life in the universe, regardless of how stingy you are with the rarity. There almost certainly is - unless there's some magic involved making it unique to this planet.

>Organic material has been found all over our solar system, indicating it's somewhat common.
>Water is pretty common.
>We have found loads of planets capable of holding liquid water
And what is the probability of life forming on a planet that has water and organic material? That is the key point. It may be so low that it makes the number of earthlike planets in the universe virtually irrelevant when predicting the probability of alien life.

>regardless of how rare it might be, there's almost certainly life on other planets
No, this is not a logical statement. The probability can be so low that it's basically 0, it can also be so high that it's basically 1.
Please reread the part I quoted and tell me how that's logical.

All of these things answer the question "What data do we have that indicates other livable planets are common" and not the question "What data do we have that indicates life is common".

>More importantly, there's so many worlds out there, that even if life is so rare that it only occurs on, to use layman span, on "0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%" of solar systems, then there'd still be billions and billions of solar systems sustaining life out there.
This is just factually wrong "given the data we have". You clearly don't understand powers of 10.

0 is not rare.
0 is non-existent.

"Basically 0", is still a fuckload, when you're counting planets in the universe.

If it can happen anywhere else AT ALL, there are so many planets under similar circumstances that it's going to happen countless times.

Even if life was made of some extremely rare element, odds are, there'd still be some out there, somewhere. As life is made up of extremely common elements, it's more likely that there's a whole lot of it out there.

You're right, it'd be several magnitudes of trillions of life sustaining planets, not billions.

Universe is big, yo.

I cannot respond to someone who's saying factually incorrect statements. You don't understand how probability works or maybe you can't fathom really big numbers? And you also just keep saying the universe is big, without actually knowing anything about how big it is. The size is irrelevant, if there's a finite amount of matter, you can easily think of a probability where life becomes basically 0 elsewhere in the universe. Since we don't know the probability, you can't say if it's common or not.

We have no idea about how much life there actually is but that's completely besides the point. If we don't know anything about a certain variable, it should be ignored. The variables we do have however points to life being common. Of course it's a big stretch but the alternative, that life is extremely rare and we're somehow special, is an even bigger stretch so I hold on to the most likely scenario until actual evidence proves otherwise.

People respect the possibility of aliens yet disrespect the notion of God. Hypocrisy is a part of humanity from what I can tell as well as contradictions.

>The variables we do have however points to life being common
What are these variables that points to life being common? Are you confusing this point with "livable planets" again?

We know something of the circumstances that are required for it to happen in regards to the various life origin theories we have. We have even more data regarding what it takes to sustain it. And we data regarding how common those circumstances are in the universe.

Finite though it maybe, there is a LOT of matter, there are a LOT of planets like ours. So many, that there are countless number of planets under effectively identical circumstances. There is simply no reasonable possibility small enough that you could reasonably place on it, for there not to be countless worlds with life on them. The best you could possibly do, is make it small enough that there might not be any other life in this galaxy, and even that would be being pretty dishonest, and you're still left with countless other galaxies.

I mean, yeah, you can take all that out of the picture, ignore it all, along with reason, and just state by pure decree "the chance is zero", but that isn't exactly logical.

How many livable planets there are is directly proportional to how much life there is, no matter the chance of life actually developing. Literally no matter what number you give on the chance of life, it's still true that if a set has 100 livable planets, it's twice as likely to develop life than a set of 50 planets.

However, no one can give me a number on that right now. We do know that there's a fuck huge ton of livable planets out there though, and relatively densely to, so there is proportionally a fuck huge bigger chance that there's life out there. Until you give me an actual number, I will conclude that life should be common.

You just keep saying what's reasonable, but you have no actual data for what's reasonable and what's not. Also I never said that the chance is zero, my entire point so far has been that you cannot logically state whether it's probable or not probable, just that it's possible.

> The best you could possibly do, is make it small enough that there might not be any other life in this galaxy, and even that would be being pretty dishonest, and you're still left with countless other galaxies.

This is a good example of your stupidity, you're just randomly making up numbers here. You have no idea what you're talking about.

Life is improbable and animal life is absurdly improbable, it took a billion years before the first eukaryotes emerged, it was a mere accident, it might never have happened.

If there are 50 planets with x% chance of occurrence and 100 planets with x% chance of occurrence, you still cannot say anything about it being probable or not. x is still undefined. Your logic doesn't make sense, the more planets the more probable life is, sure, relative to less planets it's more probable, but that's completely irrelevant until x is defined.

Not that guy but you're making up numbers to. You're assuming there's some grand mechanism that almost completely prevents life from developing, even when all the conditions are right for it. You're assuming that the development of life is so astronomically improbable that we are the only ones so far. Your number is just as much of an asspull as any other.

Besides, we have no evidence of such a mechanism existing so the argument is irrelevant anyway.

Literally in the post you quoted:
>my entire point so far has been that you cannot logically state whether it's probable or not probable, just that it's possible

So you are an expert at calculating probabilities? The size of the universe is dwarfed by seemingly simple things. The number of legal chess positions is greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe. I don't see how you can criticize someone for not being awed by the size of the universe when compared to the complexity of forming life. We have no computers that can simulate atoms in a way that allows us to discover the probability of life occurring, so how can you so easily dismiss the complexity required to form life?

I somewhat agree with you OP.
To say there's certainly life without any evidence because "We just haven't found where it is" is religious thinking.

Yes our core components are uncommon but we have no idea what triggered our abiogenesis and that event might be incredibly rare or impossible in the other areas that fit our required composite element makeup.

Looking for evidence is fine, just baselessly asserting there is is fine as long as you don't shit on religion for doing the same thing, otherwise it's hypocrtiical.

>If there are 50 planets with x% chance of occurrence and 100 planets with x% chance of occurrence, you still cannot say anything about it being probable or not.
Yes I can. I can say one is more probable than the other.

You're under this weird idea that unless you have every single variable clearly defined, you can't make any useful assumptions or conclusions. If this logic was true, science would've never happened and even banging rocks together would've been to advanced for us.

Science works with unknown variables constantly. We have to. And the way we do that is be following the variables we do have and see what conclusions we can draw from those.

Right now we don't have a lot of variables defined as to how common life should be. My point is that the variables we DO have points towards life being common.

>Why do so many otherwise "logical" people say that it's likely there is life on other planets?
too many brainlets on this planet.
point proven.

>Given the data that we have

Induction problem there, brainlet.

>you cannot logically state whether it's probable or not probable, just that it's possible.
That's all OP asked for.

If it's possible, at all, there's more than enough planets out there to make it a statistical inevitability.

If you want numbers, fine, we know there's about 100 billion stars, just in our galaxy (which is kinda on the small side). So far as we can tell, most of those stars have planets, averaging around a dozen. Kornreich's most conservative estimate gave us 10 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, and then Hubble bumped that number to perhaps a billion trillion. On top of that, the CMB suggests there are 90 times more galaxies than which we can see within the observable universe.

So we have... A nigh infinite number of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. Even if each star only had 1 world around it, you'd be looking at an effectively limitless number of worlds, just like ours, and if only one in a tiny fraction of a trillion of those had life, you'd still be looking at a countless number of worlds with life.

It doesn't much matter how rare you make it, there's just that many damned planets out there - any possibility at all makes it inevitable.

And given that there's nothing at all unusual about this solar system, beyond the fact that we're here, and how common the materials involved are, all indications are that life isn't rare at all.

I mean, if you wanna discuss the likelihood that there is someone with your exact genetic make up, down to the last bit of DNA coding, then we can discuss possibly likelihoods of something not existing in the universe - but even then, there are just so many worlds around, that even that, isn't an entirely null possibility.

Probably because of the sheer size of the universe alone? Probably I dunno, could be wrong.

>Yes I can. I can say one is more probable than the other.
I literally said that in the next sentence.
>Science works with unknown variables constantly.
Please answer this question:
x * 100 = ?

The evidence we DO have points to it being probable. You're dismissing evidence on the grounds that there're still things we don't know.

Of course there is, no one is arguing against that, there's a shit ton of evidence we don't have. That doesn't mean you can just dismiss the evidence we do have already.

If an ancient Greek astronomer came to the conclusion that the earth was round, would you dismiss his conclusion on the grounds that he didn't discover heliocentrims in the process or didn't get the circumference of the earth completely right?

The probability of other life in the universe is >0

The universe is enormously huge, tending to infinity

Therefore the probability of at least one extraterriestal species to exist tends to one.

>nigh infinite
This phrase basically sums up you're entire ignorance of probabilities. Anything that's finite is not "nigh infinite". If it's finite the unknown probability can make the chances very high or very low, we don't know. You can't possibly fathom a probability that's extremely low, but there is no proof that it would be high or low. No one has figured out how to create life yet.

I agree with this hypothetical, however it is only a hypothetical that the universe is infinite. As soon as it becomes finite, no matter how big, the probability becomes undefined. Do you agree?

how could they deduce atomic bombs could exist if there didnt exist any at the time? extrapolating from 0 atomic bombs you get get """logically""" 0 atomic bombs.

calculate the number of atomic bombs in zero atomic bombs. ill wait......

Right, but even if theres finite space, the space changes over time (shit moves,explodes and so on), if you let infinite time then the argument still stands

No one said aliens couldn't exist.

Unless you consider this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

How about you define a mechanism that would make life so rare that out of the trillions of trillions of potentially habitable planets, only one actually developed life, based entirely on our current level of understanding?

While you work on that, I'll live with the evidence we do have.

You seem to be not understanding the point again. I never said it's probable or not probable, just that we can't make a statement on the probability aside from that it's greater than 0.

i see your neocortex has a hard ceiling on the number of levels of abstraction it can handle. pity.

>No one has figured out how to create life yet.
Actually, that's been done to various degrees quite a few times and quite a few different ways, the debate is more towards as to which way life actually occurred here, of which we have several different possibilities.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

Suffice to say, there's more than enough worlds for any or all of those possibilities to have happened more times than you could hope to count.

>but there is no proof that it would be high or low
Again, it doesn't matter. Any chance, at all, and it's out there. There's just too many opportunities for the same shit, or even some shit close enough resulting in the same shit, for it to happen for it not to be a statistical inevitability.

It is thus logical to declare there is life elsewhere in the universe, and wholly illogical to assume otherwise.

Barring, again, magic being involved, nullifying
logic and statistics.

>As soon as it becomes finite, no matter how big, the probability becomes undefined.
The possibility exists, and though finite, the universe is more than large enough to make it a statistical inevitability.

The evidence does say it's probable.

Give me counter evidence that proves it should be improbable instead of raving on about possible evidence that could make it improbable which may or may not actually exist.