New Model Calculates Chances of Intelligent Beings In Our Universe and Beyond (ras.ac.uk) 104
Chances of intelligent life emerging in our Universe "and in any hypothetical ones beyond it" can be estimated by a new theoretical model, reports the Royal Astronomical Society.
Since stars are a precondition for the emergence of life, the new research predicts that a typical observer [i.e., intelligent life] should experience a substantially larger density of dark energy than is seen in our own Universe... The approach presented in the paper involves calculating the fraction of ordinary matter converted into stars over the entire history of the Universe, for different dark energy densities. The model predicts this fraction would be approximately 27% in a universe that is most efficient at forming stars, compared to 23% in our own Universe. Dark energy makes the Universe expand faster, balancing gravity's pull and creating a universe where both expansion and structure formation are possible. However, for life to develop, there would need to be regions where matter can clump together to form stars and planets, and it would need to remain stable for billions of years to allow life to evolve.
Crucially, the research suggests that the astrophysics of star formation and the evolution of the large-scale structure of the Universe combine in a subtle way to determine the optimal value of the dark energy density needed for the generation of intelligent life. Professor Lucas Lombriser, Université de Genève and co-author of the study, added: "It will be exciting to employ the model to explore the emergence of life across different universes and see whether some fundamental questions we ask ourselves about our own Universe must be reinterpreted."
The study was funded by the EU's European Research Council, and published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
Since stars are a precondition for the emergence of life, the new research predicts that a typical observer [i.e., intelligent life] should experience a substantially larger density of dark energy than is seen in our own Universe... The approach presented in the paper involves calculating the fraction of ordinary matter converted into stars over the entire history of the Universe, for different dark energy densities. The model predicts this fraction would be approximately 27% in a universe that is most efficient at forming stars, compared to 23% in our own Universe. Dark energy makes the Universe expand faster, balancing gravity's pull and creating a universe where both expansion and structure formation are possible. However, for life to develop, there would need to be regions where matter can clump together to form stars and planets, and it would need to remain stable for billions of years to allow life to evolve.
Crucially, the research suggests that the astrophysics of star formation and the evolution of the large-scale structure of the Universe combine in a subtle way to determine the optimal value of the dark energy density needed for the generation of intelligent life. Professor Lucas Lombriser, Université de Genève and co-author of the study, added: "It will be exciting to employ the model to explore the emergence of life across different universes and see whether some fundamental questions we ask ourselves about our own Universe must be reinterpreted."
The study was funded by the EU's European Research Council, and published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
If we assume... (Score:5, Funny)
If we assume that conditions on Earth are optimal for the evolution of intelligent life then very little chance because I've checked Earth extensively and couldn't find any.
A Thousand Brains? (Or none at all?) (Score:2)
I'd like to add an early reference in the discussion to A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins. In the third part of the book (though the first part is the best) he addresses the topic from the perspective of creating a long-lasting "We were here" beacon. Essentially he suggests that huge artificial artifacts could be constructed in orbit around a star that would clearly indicate that intelligence life was nearby. (Not sure if he specified using a nearby star, but that seems obvious?) I think he's quite reason
Re: A Thousand Brains? (Or none at all?) (Score:2)
Seriously, there's even a clear benefit to extinguishing some other intelligence's beacons: you increase the likelihood that a rising civilization thinks it is alone, and thus doesn't c
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I think the problem with that angle is that they haven't extinguished us. I think one of your premises is that the civilization would be long-lived, and that would give them time to look for all the planets hospitable for various forms of life.
My angle would be that if such a long-lived "intelligent" species does exist, they probably are monitoring all the suitable planets, but they must be motivated by curiosity about the various ways evolution solves the problems. However they would also be defensive, kee
Re: A Thousand Brains? (Or none at all?) (Score:2)
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I think if they are really paranoid they would be extinguishing way in advance, though the dangerous assumption there is that evolution always starts relatively slow, and we only have the one example to study. They wouldn't be waiting to the last minute to "Exterminate".
But if we want to go wild with speculations on the topic, perhaps the dinosaurs were ended because they were judged to be too close to developing our sort of intelligence? And perhaps our asteroid is on its collision course already?
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OK, that's not going to be very visible.
A billion-year lifetime implies using one of the commoner stars in the universe. I make it smaller than 2.5 solar masses - with a modest dependency on the metallicity. But that automatically means that it's not going to be a particularly bright star. Checking my lists ... there's 1 star of the 50-closest that fails this criterion. So 49 of the closest 50 stars would be eli
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Interesting and thoughtful reply, but mostly I recommend you read the book for the AI stuff.
In terms of implementation, my thinking is that it's a job for robots, but robots that are quite a bit better than any we have created yet. I actually think they would have to be on the edge of paper clip maximizers--which might be why such beacons don't get built. Too much danger that such robots might escape their designated star and start building lots of beacons? So they are banned by some sort of "rolling" galac
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Implying that there is FTL communication of information (question one way ; response the other way.
Well, FTL, or literally geological speeds of communication, decision and response. "I'll just think that over for a millennium or three ..."
As you s
Watch the spinning coin! (Score:2)
Mostly yes and I think you've understood most of my intentions. I am definitely not speculating on FTL, but evolution (as we know it) works slowly, so plenty of time for travel. I started with the white dwarf idea to keep the construction smaller, but your considerations led me to thinking about bigger objects. I haven't been playing with the idea much lately, but my last version was basically a giant coin. Imagine a planet with a metallic core (like our very own earth) remade into a huge flat coin. The coi
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2^32 is around a billion (2^10~=1000 ; 2^20~=1 million ...) ; 2^64 is a Very Big Number.
If you're making this heavy enough and dense enough to have a stable rotation speed to parts in a million~billion ... look for the list of Large Prime Numbers to find one in your comfort zone. Being prime it gets really hard to argue "it's an overtone/ unde
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Just the ACK for now, but your reply is so substantive that I don't know if I'll be able to properly address it on the other reply side... Short summary is that the fundamental problems with any kind of rigid artifact led me to drop the approach--but made me think of the rings of Saturn. [But over to that side...]
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I was hoping for another thought provoking reply from you, but based on what you said earlier I'm still thinking about the "space washer" design, and the more I thought about it, the messier the problem seemed--but that led me to a new solution approach.
What if careful study of Saturn determines that the rings of Saturn as they exist now cannot be a natural phenomenon? Maybe the "enhanced" rings are a signal? One obvious meaning would be "We noticed your planet was about to develop intelligent life around t
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That boat could have flown ... as late as the 1970s. But when the rings of Uranus were discovered in ... about 1978? (pre-Voyager flyby observing programme, including occultations, IIRC).
Then in the early 80s, the discovery of the (incomplete, maybe not temporally stable) rings of Neptune.
Then, early 2000s, the rings around Haumea. (Kuiper Belt object, about Pluto-mass).
I haven't been keep
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Again, a very heavy reply and I see few points that seem at all debatable, though I'm no astrophysicist. (I am currently reading a book from a couple of them, however... We Have No Idea by Cham and Whiteson.)
My theory is somewhat different, however. Yes, I know that there are lots of rings, but Saturn's seem quite extreme. I am speculating along the lines that a local beacon is much more convenient than a big one. The rings of Saturn are estimated to be a few hundred million years old and will last for ab
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The term you're looking for is, I think, a "technosignature".
I don't know that joke, but whatever. A technosignature that looks like an end member of a natural continuum is very open to misinterpretation. That we can be having this discussion is another way of saying t
Neither did the article authors (Score:2)
The probability is high (Score:4, Insightful)
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Given how vast the universe is, I think the better question to ask is, "What is the likelihood that there isn't intelligent life elsewhere?"
Indeed, but yet there are no observable signs of intelligent life anywhere. Kardashev [wikipedia.org] Type 1 would be observable in nearby starts, Type 2 would be detectable to us anywhere in our galaxy and Type 3 would be detectable in a lot of visible galaxies.
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Re: The probability is high (Score:3)
We're not Type 1, and all of them, especially 2 and 3 are high fantasy. Should be detectable in nearby stars... ok, like looking for Bigfoot behind the palm tree in your back yard.
Drawing a straight line of energy consumption out to arbitrary levels is as dumb as drawing population graphs out to infinity. A flourishing civilization may not EVER get to Type 1.
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Perhaps not in your comment, but the rest of us disagree.
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There's a problem with your question: you don't define "intelligent".
There are a number of nonhuman species (elephants, octopi, etc) on Earth that display some degree of intelligence, but wouldn't meet the "conventional" definition (technologically advanced civilization-builders).
"The problems that life has had to encounter here are not so different from the problems that life has had to encounter elsewhere."
That's not necessarily true. Earth has a lot of things going for it. Our star has stable energy outp
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The error in your calculations (as you've described them) is in believing that the chemical interactions are random. The reactions are random, but the consequences are not. Once you form your first self-catalytic replicator (say, an inefficient chain of a few dozen RNA-like monomers), you have a locked-in mechanism of selection to higher efficiency of the entire system (from fixing inorganic carbon into organic compound
Re: The probability is high (Score:1)
Not the Question, Summary is Awful (Score:5, Informative)
Specifically there has been something called the anthropic principle where the apparent fine tuning of our universe's initial parameters to create a universe where life is possible is explained as us being one of an infinite multitude of universes but that only universes where intelligent life is possible have observers to see it. Think of it like a person in a dark room throwing a pair of dice where the light only gets turned on if one of the dice shows a '6'. In such a case you will never see a total less than '7' but that bias is because you only see throws where there is at least one 6, not that the dice are somehow weighted.
What this paper suggests is that we are not actually in a particularly fine-tuned universe based on star formation and there is a wide range of universes in which there should be sufficient star formation that life is likely assuming that the probability of observers is proportional to the amount of stars. So rather than being some deluded sci-fi attempt at calculating the probability of life which it does not do at all, it simply assumes that the probability of life is proportional to the amount of stars formed and tries to estimate the chance of us evolving in a universe with the observed cosmological parameters. The result is that it suggests that our universe does not seem to be particularly fine-tuned thus questioning the anthropic principle.
The problem here is that some idiot publicist/journalist has got hold of the paper and tried to hype it in a way that makes it sound far "sexier" but also far less scientific, than it actually is. This is actually decent science just hyped to make it sound instead like bad science fiction. Misrepresenting things like this to garner interest has to stop. We do science because it is important, not to gain likes on social media, and if this misrepresentation continues, then like the boy who cries wolf, when we do find something important and actually need people to pay attention and believe it, nobody will.
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, it simply assumes that the probability of life is proportional to the amount of stars formed
I don't see how this is a reasonable assumption
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At the most basic level life needs complex syste
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The primordial universe, shortly after the "first 3 minutes" (when the Big Bang cooled and expanded, through the period of quark formation, and the period of baryon formation, and the period of non-stellar nucleosynthesis) contained about 75% hydrogen ; 20% helium, and very small traces of lithium and any other nuclei, with a lot of electrons. A couple of hundred thousand years later, those nuclei re-combined with the electrons to form neutral hydroge
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> Given how vast the universe is, I think the better question to ask is, "What is the likelihood that there isn't intelligent life elsewhere?"
[...] pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth
(Monty Python - Galaxy Song)
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Not to mention the distance issue may be insurmountable. Just getting a colony sized group to the nearest habitable planet may not be a viable possibility even for an advanced civilization.
What in the world has happened to science? (Score:1, Insightful)
Good Lord, a "scientific" paper using a "modeled" distribution of "dark" energy to predict the "emergence" of intelligent life via natural selection of randomly mutated changes in genetic structures?
That's the plot of a Sci-Fi novel.
Re:What in the world has happened to science? (Score:4, Interesting)
Good Lord, a "scientific" paper using a "modeled" distribution of "dark" energy to predict the "emergence" of intelligent life via natural selection of randomly mutated changes in genetic structures?
That's the plot of a Sci-Fi novel.
Already been done to some extent. Life on a neutron star [wikipedia.org].
Not what the paper does (Score:2)
So to answer your question, what has happened to science is that the people
Assumptions (Score:4, Interesting)
Since stars are a precondition for the emergence of life,
That's a rather large assumption, I would say. Energy of some kind is surely a precondition for life, but does it have to come from stars?
and it would need to remain stable for billions of years to allow life to evolve.
Given that we have a sample size of 1, do you really feel confident assuming you know how long it takes for life to evolve?
Dark energy makes the Universe expand faster, balancing gravity's pull and creating a universe where both expansion and structure formation are possible.
These seem like inordinately confident assertions considering how little we actually know about dark energy.
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Given that we have a sample size of 1, do you really feel confident assuming you know how long it takes for life to evolve?
Billions of years is likely an overestimate of what’s possible, but any life as it’s remotely defined needs to store information and process it in a way to evolve. So long periods of stability are likely a minimum requirement. It could be deep within a planet around an unstable star, it could possibly evolve on a gas planet without a usable surface, but it does need stability or its self replicating pattern is simply wiped away.
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Dark energy works however they want it to work, since it only exists to make their math produce a correct answer. Don't try this at home, your teacher isn't going to fall for it, or that the dog ate your homework.
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These seem like inordinately confident assertions considering how little we actually know about dark energy.
We do not even know if it actually exists
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Since stars are a precondition for the emergence of life,
That's a rather large assumption, I would say. Energy of some kind is surely a precondition for life, but does it have to come from stars?
and it would need to remain stable for billions of years to allow life to evolve.
Given that we have a sample size of 1, do you really feel confident assuming you know how long it takes for life to evolve?
Dark energy makes the Universe expand faster, balancing gravity's pull and creating a universe where both expansion and structure formation are possible.
These seem like inordinately confident assertions considering how little we actually know about dark energy.
Most science about life in general makes the assumption that Earth is the absolute pinnacle of what is possible with life in general. Therefore, scientists tend to start from the premise of, "Everything about Earth is the perfect model." I have a funny feeling we're not the perfect model. In fact, if there is any true intelligence out there, they'll probably be shocked to find this muddy rock managed to create lifeforms that are capable of asking the questions, "What are we? Why are we here? How did this ha
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That's a rather large assumption, I would say. Energy of some kind is surely a precondition for life, but does it have to come from stars?
Of course it has to come from stars. Where else is an energy differential consistently applied? Sure, it may be a second or third order effect, but the energy for life ultimately comes from stars.
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Chemical elements - specifically, their nuclei (the electrons are abundant and interchangeable) - are also a precondition for life. I think we'd agree on that - no?
The gas clouds we can see between the first stars in the universe and us only contain absorption lines for hydrogen and helium nuclei. The number of lines possible is finite ; the number of line-spacings is al
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It's been a while since I read "The Dragon's Egg" (and there was a sequel ...), but I recall th
Nonesense (Score:5, Insightful)
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TRILLIONS is a relatively small number, cosmologically speaking.
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I think all we can say is that abiogenesis has happened AT LEAST ONCE on Earth (assuming you don't hold with panspermia or similar theories). It's quite possible that it has happened multiple times but that the resulting organism then died for other reasons. E.g. It may have drifted into an area too hot/cold/acidic/alkaline for it to survive, or if it happened today it could be rapidly eaten by an amoeba several billion years ahead of it in its evolution.
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"or after that one life-starting event"
It is unlikely for any life-starting event to get going once RNA/DNA based life took off since it would suppress and/or consume anything organic from that point on.
TL; DR (Score:1)
Model makes many assumptions to come up +-100000% (Score:3)
Model makes many assumptions to come up an answer that is +-100000% .
I am not sure how a model that estimates various things that we actually have zero idea about (or even what is or if it actually exists--dark energy/matter), could come up with a useful answer.
Maybe as a though experiment.
But probably Garbage in/Garbage out.
Plenty of versions of the Drake Equation out there (Score:2)
Plate tectonics (Score:2)
More evidence (Score:2)
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> Are we on the verge of publicly having contact with other civilizations?
Yes. By 2050 it will be common knowledge that they are already here.
You will still put your pants on one leg at a time, pay your taxes, and take out your garbage. **YAWN.**
That said, there is a very interesting book Allies of Humanity [academia.edu] that explains "first" contact is the LEAST of our worries. We need to be on guard against those that would make us dependent upon them by offering us free gifts such as technology and be united in o
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> Are we on the verge of publicly having contact with other civilizations?
Yes. By 2050 it will be common knowledge that they are already here.
You will still put your pants on one leg at a time, pay your taxes, and take out your garbage. **YAWN.**
That said, there is a very interesting book Allies of Humanity [academia.edu] that explains "first" contact is the LEAST of our worries. We need to be on guard against those that would make us dependent upon them by offering us free gifts such as technology and be united in our voices that we don't give permission for our resources to be pillaged. Our independence is our greatest asset as we learn to get along with (each other and) our cosmic neighbors.
Right, like commoners will have anything to do with it. Our politicians will sell us out for an alien bauble the second there's a landing party. Maybe it's already happened and our world is just reality TV for some aliens? That would certainly explain the last few years of bullshit we've been paying witness to. It all seems too absurd to be real.
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THE biggest problem is that We, the people, don't hold the elected accountable.
Ultimately we DO decide who is office. It is 100% solely our fault that we (continue to) elect officials that have little to zero integrity.
Sadly most people have become apathetic too busy watching sports, etc. to be concerned about the direction the country is going.
The second problem is Politics has become corrupted by greed -- we have people literally buying the vote by outspending their opposition on ads. ALL campaign contr
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Are we on the verge of publicly having contact with other civilizations? More and more articles and publication are coming out on life beyond earth, like getting people ready about the idea of us not being alone. I have no doubts about other life in the universe, we sure aren't alone. But I do have doubts about the misuse of alien technology, until we find our own way to travel faster in our own galaxy, hell even our own solar system.
We have had well over a generation of kids being raised on Ancient Aliens and the like. Of course there's more being published about the possibilities of life on other planets. When you inundate yourself with abstract pseudoscience, you tend to try to spend portions of your life trying to prove that pseudoscience correct. Not that I'm against any of this type of discussion, but the theoretical is still the theoretical until such time as we have actual evidence, as science requires.
There's also a lot of effo
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Are you implying that there is non-public contact with "other civilisations"?
That's bold.
Have you seen how gossipy astronomers are? Do you think they'd keep their traps shut over a story like that (and it's very likely their instruments that would be used - the spooks and thugs tend to look AT Earth, not away form Earth).
Oh ... you think the military would keep their traps shut? The way they did over their policies of "collateral mur
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One of the biggest 'problems' with other civilizations being known at this point is still religion. Most religions exclude the notion of other civilizations, and religion is still a big driving force for many people (oh the diluted lemmings) and that would counter their beliefs. As an atheist we ofcourse don't like to see the rug being pulled from under religion so we finally can get rid of that fraud.
And the other 'problem' is economy. If we know there is a civilization that is much more advanced as ours,
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How accurate a description of your mental state, and is your doctor successful in managing it?
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The US Govt. Department of Public Relations must have a high suicide rate. No high windows ; all portable equipment wired into wall-plates, not using user-accessible outlets. No gas. OK, Entenox, for on-the-job analgesia.
(You do see such idiocy going past in the unavoidab
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Seriously. I read a CIA officer say that "The odds a secret will leak is equal to the number of people involved, squared." Why do the same people who think the government is too incompetent to run a train system or public health care will turn around and claim the government is capable of running massive conspiracies in perfect secrecy involving thousands of people. Even the Manhattan project couldn't keep critical info from being leaked to the USSR.
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Normally, when people start with quoting "a CIA officer" about anything more significant than the current rainfall outside, I nod attentively and intend to take my raincoat regardless of what the (self-proclaimed, invariably) "CIA officer" says. But this is a matter of common observation, regardless of the incompetence of the cited source. See also : "Ancient Chinese Philosopher says ..
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People have been obsessed with aliens for almost 100 yrs at this point. They have taken the place of the savior figures that used to be held by religion such as angels.
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Misleading headline (Score:2)
And on earth? (Score:2)
Given the results of the last election (Score:2)
Stars and Water and Light ... (Score:1)
Science is supposed to be a process that is based on observed facts, reason, hypothesis, testing, conclusion, and repeatability.
AT NO POINIT ANYWHERE has anyone using "science" ever realistically showed that life requires a star "nearby." The energy from a star is necessary for OUR brand of life, but has exactly zero implications for ALL flavors of life.
AT NO PIONT ANYWHERE has anyone using "science" ever realistically showed that life requires water. Water is crucial to OUR brand of life. All the excite
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Uncertainty (Score:2)
And if uncertainty was included in this calculation, the probability could be show to be between the values of zero and one.
Probability of a single event (Score:2)
This is what is known as a meaningless quantity.
The probability of outcome of a trial repeated many dozens or hundreds of times is more meaningful. But still needs a fairly hefty asterisk attached.
Selective (Score:2)
This formula makes a lot of assumptions based on our own evolution, but does so selectively. For example, the fact that we exist means the odds of intelligent life evolving are 100%, but this formula ignores that reality while including preconditions for intelligent life drawn from our own history, such as the idea that it requires billions of years to arise. In reality, we don't know whether our timeline is typical any more than we know the statistical significance of our own existence. We only have a s
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> In reality, we don't know whether our timeline is typical any more than we know the statistical significance of our own existence
The only reasonable working assumption until we have more data is that our environment is dead average amongst environments with the potential to evolve intelligent technologically advanced life.
> Even on our own planet, all available evidence suggests that it has only happened once.
There is reason to believe that abiogenesis should be inevitable in conditions like those o
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no matter how many times they initially occurred independently of each other... THEN one lucky winner rapidly dominated.
Periodic near total extinction events may have helped with this. If not for them, this planet would be covered with a heterogeneous collection of pond scum. All competing for the same resources and dragging each other down like a giant game of crabs in a bucket.
Ummm. Just a sec ...
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>Periodic near total extinction events may have helped with this.
Almost certainly. Biodiversity seems to increase until every available niche has a stable resident species, at which point nothing else can get past local maxima to evolve into something more complex that might lead to something 'better' (at least as judged by humans).
It "can" be used (Score:2)
To calculate...
Yeah...it can.
Itdoesn't mean , just like the models before it, that this model is correct either.
Without Actual DATA ..... (Score:2)
Without having actual data on what conditions are required for "Life As We DON'T Know It", any statistical tricks are merely guesses. Here on Earth, life exists in a wide variety of environments, from sandy beaches to deep-sea fumaroles to icy mountaintops - and everywhere in between. We do not know, and CANNOT GUESS, what conditions might exist on other planets, or on moons like Titan, Ganymede or Europa, and have almost ZERO information about conditions that might exist on planets about which we know next
Not interested. (Score:2)
I have mostly stopped looking as pseudo-profound hallucinations. This "model" is clearly mostly made up hot air.