Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
One there are organisms, intelligent life doesn't seem a stretch to me, evolution gets you to that.
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You need to define terms. "Life" does not seem terribly unlikely given the math involved. Once you start talking about "organisms" those numbers collapse a bit, because life as we know it, with discrete bodies that compete and cooperate and fuck every now and then, is far from a likely outcome a second time around. The precise order of events in the geological record won't have happened in those exactly the same way anywhere else. Our present condition was an outcome of a billion trillion coin flips, were even a single heads where there should have been tails would change literally everything.
I know what I think, and it's this: there is almost definitely life out there. But the chances it has organisms on a physical scale similar or identical to ours can be ruled out, as can several other quirks of our environment -- bilateral symmetry, communication by patterned disturbance of air -- hell, even being "organic" (deriving energy and accumulating mass through the rearrangement of carbon) is supremely unlikely. Billion times a billion times is a lot, but if there's a form of life capable of traveling to meet us, we will not recognize it as "living" when it gets here. And its intelligence will also be unrecognizable, because it will have evolved to make success more likely in a totally different environment.
tl;dr: Slime molds yes; gaseous energy clouds yes; bipedal carbon-based humanoids ˇabsoluamente no!
ETA: And by "supremely unlikely" I'm aware of the scale of the universe, and I'm ruling out that the billion trillion coin flips all came out the same in one or more other places.
