No. of Recommendations: 7
Unquarked:
How crazy is it to think there might be something other than me,
or that I’m anything more than a smidgeon in the grander scheme?
Goofyhoofy:
Not crazy at all, but unless there’s some kind of demonstrable, repeatable, falsifiable evidence and proof, there’s little reason to fall for every cockamamie nut job word salad that’s thrown out there.
Else we should all believe that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunfny, unicorns, leprechauns, and heck, Valdemore and Kahn-the-space-monster actually exist and we should revolve our lives around them.
Our range of view into space is very, very narrow. When we look outwards to listen to messages by scanning photons, we are observing both a minuscule range of space (proportionate to the whole), and an even smaller minuscule period in time. Even with very nearby life, it is laughably unlikely that they transmitted exactly when we are receiving, and other did it hundreds of millions of years earlier, or later before moving on. It is hard to imagine both the time and location limit, because of the absurd scales.
To help using a crude picture, you could imagine it as we are looking of an apartment window into a permanent violent dust storm, trying to observe with our eyes, the behaviour of a rat in a city on the other side of the planet - furthermore which passed a particular place we are looking some time in the last decade. It is simply impossible, but not seeing the rat it is a poor argument for the particular rat not existing. This model is not precise but has the purpose to show both the problems of space and time scale.
As Unqua questioned (I have come to view that the sign of a true scientist is the one who asks questions that seem obvious but remains puzzled by them whilst others ignore), I do not only agree that we are not more than a smidgeon when considering the entire universe, but that anyone shown the scale of the universe - even it it took hours of building up models to really see how minuscule our visual range is with useful resolution - would be fanatical to not agree.
There are 200 billion trillion stars, many on even the most conservative probabilistic inference, having planets like our own - and some with almost identical conditions for life to start. Single cell life (though DNA was already part of it) started here almost instantly as the conditions permitted it (3.5 billion years ago, from the Earth cooling enough from its nebulous formation 4.5 billion years ago).
If we are extraordinarily pessimistic, and assume that there are only one in one billion stars having a planet with DNA-life, and we ignoring all other avenues for life completely, then that would leave 200 trillion planets with DNA-oriented life. One in a billion planets stars having planets like our own is almost crazy - place a billion sugar grains in front of you to get an idea how large this number is - but we'll use the low ratio.
We then can't observe, and will likely never, even over hundreds of thousands of years of observation time, observe, any of these 200 trillion life filled planets. We do know, from observation at home, that life spreads like not like a virus, but like - well, life.. it is a matter of observation that it likes to just keep going, even with the vast majority of species ending. So for these 200 trillion life filled planets, they are going to follow "some" course of branching evolution.
The median planet is 4.5 billion years old, the same age as Earth, so half of these planets have pass our own stage, leaving 100 trillion life filled planet with evolution having enough time to pass our own. Of the most advanced species on these 100 trillion planets, is our degree of self-reflection more advanced and insightful than every species? It is a rhetorical question.
These figures should be interpreted qualitatively rather than specifically - the conclusion is the same if they are out by several entire magnitudes. We can infer that it would exceedingly more extraordinary that we were alone, than extraordinary that we are not alone.
I want to end with some epistemology.
Scientific theory ears respect by having a means of being tested, predictive power, an the attempts to refute the theory continually failing.
However... this can mislead one into believing that this is how science progresses, and how theories are formed. The way most science develops is largely though thought experiments and logic, and not by data on the field and making generalisations and coming up with a theory.
Verily, the data is necessary in order to search hard for any refutation (and in the theory both surviving, and having predictive power) but the point I wish to make is that the inventive process (the process of forming the theory) in which the theory comes about almost never involves data and an imperial experiment as we learn in school. Often - in fact, usually - once the theory is formed, it is seems so obvious to the scientist that they hardly would waste time with an experiment. For example, Galileo did not take two balls of different mass from a building from a height of 100m and drop them, but just had a very elegant thought argument about why rate of fall would not be affected by mass - you can read his arguments. Most theory is developed in such a way. Even the most famous theory in science, E=mc^2 was treated as fact well before being tested with the dreadful bomb experiments, or later actually quantitatively for the first time with measurements a century after the theory proposed (by Laurent Lellouch), and it like that through the science.
Theories that either have no means of a future empirical test (or pass the tests but have no predictive power) require doubt/skepticism to the extreme. However it is a matter of historical record that most theories are formed, contrary to what we are taught, with a non-empirical elegant thought experiments.
- Manlobbi
