No. I would put the odds of me occuring at one.

wierd

This is because I currently exist. If you showed me a newly formed planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a G type star and asked me the odds of me turning up and walking around after 4 and a half billion years I would rate them as very very small.

Anyway, my point was that gene changes are fairly common, you know some mutants. And most of these mutations are not fatal. One reason why is because we have a double set of chromosones. But new mutations are constantly entering the genepool. I was under the impression you might have thought that our genetics had to be "just right" for us to survive when really it's more a matter of whatever works. We are rather shoddily put together. I produce more earwax than I could ever concievably need.

Speaking purely as a layperson with no special training in either evolutionary biology or probability theory, I think such probabilistic calculations fail to take into account the constrained randomness that characterizes evolutionary processes, and the emergence of complexity from relatively simple initial conditions and rules.

The limited number of molecules sufficiently small, abundant, and chemically flexible enough to rapidly produce zillions (the technical term, I believe) of combinations in the primeval liquid water soup already imposes a broad but definite constraint on the range of possibilities.

Combinations that can replicate reliably into similar but not necessarily identical versions of themselves further constrain the range of possibilities, restricting the extent of random variability to perhaps mere millions rather than gazillions (approximately the square of a zillion) of options.

As life continues to develop, each organism reproduces within a constrained range of possible random mutation, and each mutation is further constrained by intrinsic and extrinsic factors that allow only a small fraction to survive and reproduce again.

Counting up the mathematically possible number of nucleotide combinations is not terribly relevant except to demonstrate the severe winnowing of that theoretical total by the constraints placed upon the randomness of evolutionary development by environmental conditions and past mutational history.

Life is not the product of pure unconstrained randomness, as the probabilistic statistics cited by damian1727 might suggest. Life is rather a dialectical process emerging from the dynamic interplay of determinism and randomness, two principles which on their own are sterile and static.

This illustrates a paradoxical aspect of the concept of infinity: life is infinitely variable, but within limits. Which I suppose is no more mysterious (and no less) than the infinity of fractional numbers found between zero and one.

None of which detracts from damian1727's excellent point about the value of such speculation in bringing home the miraculousness of life on Earth, regardless of its cosmic rarity or commonness, and the reciprocal obligation owed by giant-brained conscious beings to the biological matrix from which consciousness, and even better things like hoppy beer, jazz, and snuggling, emerged.

sweeet!! (i wish richard dawkins was here) you cant argue that intelligent life
is a given if u mix a bit of water and mud....



yes the odds are veery small thats the point ... very very small

see we agree after all

lets snuggle!!

Actually, I don't think I said anything inconsistent with the gospel of St. Richard. And while I could argue that "intelligent life is a given if u mix a bit of water and mud", my fidelity to scientific method, and the painful memory of my ultimately disproven theories regarding the supernatural provenance of Christmas presents and, even more disastrously, lactococcic lunar ontogeny, incline me to await the results of empirical investigation first.

Call me repressed, but the randomness of my snuggling activity is itself constrained by certain distinct parameters of species, gender, physical appearance, and the ineffable subtleties of personality and pheremones.

In other words, unless you're an attractive female Japanese snow monkey who's into foreign films, entheogenic spelunking, the overthrow of corporate capitalism, and long soaks in natural hot springs under gently falling snow, I'm afraid I'll have to draw the line at a firm handshake and a hearty "hail-fellow-well-met." And maybe some of that hoppy beer.

Nothing personal, of course.

I'm informing my evil corporate minions to be on the lookout for snow monkeys flinging legislation right now. (Not that I think you can do as much damage to capitalism as those who restrict information and those who fail in their duties to stockholders.)

Odds schmodds...

Ask a winning lottery ticket holder what the odds of them winning were before they walked away with the cash, and whether it really mattered.

The fact is... they won.

yessss but no one else did.....

yessss but someone did......


Even if ONE planet beats the "odds"... then the odds weren't real to begin with.

When I play the lottery, I play 50/50 for me. I either win... or I don't. Each time it is 50/50. You can't count the other times I play.

I know this is ATM... but What I am trying to say is there is no way to know anything for sure until there is evidence one way or the other.... in any situation.

The rest is odds...which is quantum physics.... and that has nothing to do with anything but math so far. Not real physical things.

?huh?

if you say so

i still maintain that the odds of intelligent life evolving are slight

and so far the evidence supports that view

50 50? i dont think so

How slight? We're here.

I'm not talking about odds before the fact.

If there is I.L. out there.... it already is.

The only thing we have a right to put any kind of odds on is the possibility of it arising from here-on-out.

Describing the odds as "slight" isn't really meaningful. Let's say the odds of intelligent life occurring are one in a million. That's pretty unlikely. But if there are ten million earths out there in the universe, it becomes quite likely that intelligent life occurs on one or more of them. In fact, it would be unlikely that no intelligent life arose anywhere.

Conversely, if there are only 100,000 potential earths, then there is a fair chance that none of them will contain intelligent life (apart from ours, of course).

Unfortunately, we cannot yet obtain accurate figures of a) the odds for or against life evolving, or b) the number of potential life-bearing planets.

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Spike
:)

When I was a kid, and first read about atom smashers, I had this nightmare about nuclear scientists accidently creating a black hole, and sucking the whole solar system and beyond into it...

...which, if every time a civilization reaches a certain level of maturity, before they can go intergalactic they make the same uneducation mistake, and there is no one left to learn from the error.

The proof of this concept is all the black holes...that would not happen, if we quit screwing around

Edited to add: Did I actually see Mr. Obvious a couple of pages back?

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jwj

If you always believe what you already know, you can't learn anything - Liz

Don't worry. If they do create a black hole...

1. It will be so small, and last for such a short time, it won't have any effect other than something they can observe reacting to it.

2. If they create a black hole that sucks us in, we will never know.