A cool thought :)

[johnfosteruk]

On 6 May 2016 at 14:29, symesie04 said:

Im not sure i see the logic here. You seem to be saying that the development of life is a incredible rarity thats probably limited to this one tiny corner of the universe backed up by the fact that we shouldnt speculate on its existence elsewhere as we only have one example of it happening. But surely the argument is exactly the same if turned around, how can we be sure life is very rare and unlikely as we only have one example to use as a guide. Surely by your argument life elsewhere is just as likely as its absence and therefore both sides of the argument are equally as shaky. However we know from experiments that if we create correct conditions for say crystals to grow or bacteria they will grow every time we repeat those conditions. If we looked out into the universe and saw no sings of where conditions maybe similar then the arguments maybe on equal footing as they were 20 years or so ago. But today theres an ever growing number of possible worlds that could provide that same Petri dish for life and we havent even looked beyond our tiny corner. Yes statistics are probably a non value in the argument but data isnt statistics and the more data we are presented with the ever greater the likely hood of life existing elsewhere it appears. 

Agreed, Ravenous said "But maybe the first step is more unlikely than people think" 

Unlikely isn't really a limiting factor on a cosmic scale, even locally on a geological scale - hence evolution. Stars are born given the right conditions, and that happens in the billions of billions, stars have planets in their droves as we're starting to see thanks to Kepler (1284 planets so far I believe) etc and so on.

Obviously none of this is evidence for life elsewhere in the multiverse  but it's compelling enough to make it worth looking and supposing and imagining, surely.