What kind of idiot thinks.............?

Question

What kind of idiot things theres no life in space?
gee were here and there millions of other planets with a sun near them....wonder what the odds of no life are?

(other planet life)

Answer 1

Belief or proof of a theory requires evidence. When more evidence comes (other than one datapoint: earth), then more people will believe. To believe in something when there is a real lack of evidence I think is called gullibility.

Answer 2

The kind of idiots that understand large numbers.

I've heard some people say on this site that "it's like having 1000 monkeys randomly hitting keys on a typewriter, eventually one will type out Hamlet"

Let me actually put this into perspective for you.

Hamlet has roughly 10^5 (10 raised to the 5th power) characters. To simplify things assume that all lower case is acceptable, so that there are 36 characters to work with (26 letters and 10 punctuation characters: space, return, period comma, colon, semicolon, quotation mark, question mark, apostrophy, and dash).

So the probablility to get the first character of Hamlet right is (1/36). The probability to get the first two characters right is (1/36)*(1/36) and so on.

If you carry this out all 10^5 times, you'll see that the probablility for any random string of 10^5 key strokes is roughly

10^(-155,630)

Note the minus sign. That number is 1 over 1 followed by 155,630 zeros. You can't compute that on a hand calculator because of how small it is, but since I have a CAS on my computer, I can check it no problem.

Now say that instead of 1000 monkeys we have 1 billion monkeys, and they have been around since the Big Bang (roughly 5 x 10^17 seconds ago) just smacking away at keys. Assume they hit keys at the rate of 2 per second and they do this randomly. This gives us roughly a string of 10^27 characters to look through for Hamlet. Which will still only yeild a probablity of finding Hamlet of approximately 10^(-155,600). Note: whenever I have said "roughly" or "approximately" it has been on the side of Hamlet actually being typed out.

That number is still ridiculously small.

Here is a (kinda crappy) site that gives a lower bound on the number of planets potentially capable of supporting life in the Universe.

http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/Extraterrestrial%20life.htm

The number they give is

10,000,000,000

but that seems small so let's square it, giving about 10^20 potentially habitable planets. That's one followed by 20 zeros, just to make it a bit more than the "millions" you were suggesting.

How does this effect the odds of Hamlet being produced if there was such a set of Monkeys for every such potential life producing planet? Not much, now it is only 10^(-155,580). Still inconceivably small.

We cannot say for sure what the conditions are to create life so I can't give you a solid probablity on that. I think it is fair to assume that it is less than the random generation of a simple book.

So where, do I stand? I personally tend to think that there is life in space, but I'm an idiot so I guess that makes me the kind of idiot that thinks along the same lines you do. It's a belief. Beliefs aren't rational things and they never will be.

P.S. Here is something a little interesting.

Say there were an INFINITE number of planets in the universe. This STILL does not guarantee life somewhere else. To see how this is possible, look at this infinite set of numbers.

{...,-2n,...-6, -4 ,- 2 , 0 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 6 , ... 2n,...}

If we were that 3, the only odd number in the group, then we would still be the only one in an infinite sea that had a certain property. Just like we could still be the only planet with the property that life exists on it.

Answer 3

Has anybody said there was no life outside the Earth?

It seems very likely there is.

But some would argue that if there was intelligent life elsewhere in the Milky Way, we would have encountered it already. It's possible that one or more of the steps in evolution and history that lead to our civilization were so unlikely that they only happened on this single planet.

Answer 4

We do not know how many planets there are, but it is estimated that there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy and there are 100 billion galaxies in our universe. Planets are associated with stars, so we can be confident that there are probably billions of planets in our universe.
Surely some small fraction of them would be expected to support some form of life.

Answer 5

Only an idiot would think there is no possibility of life in space.

Only an idiot would think that possibility is exactly 100%.

While I think the possibility is high, I do not fool myself into thinking we can say for sure that there is life in space. That would be arrogantly foolish of me.

Answer 6

I'm quite certain there's life elsewhere in the Universe. *Intelligent* life *within a reasonable radius*, not so very much. Space is just too big. We will not communicate with an interstellar civilization in our lifetimes.

Answer 7

The same idiot who believes in science (which includes the Big Bang theory).

Answer 8

The ignorant people that dont believe in God (Jesus Christ) If you or anyone else would read the Bible it tells you that God didnt make the solar systems and planets just for there to be a lack of life. But what God has done is put only one intelligent life form in each solar sysytem. Why? Because He didnt put us hear to focus on the other intelligent life forms. Nor them focus on us. He put us here so that eventually we may come into the wisdom of His glory and praise Him.
We find ourselves oddly alone in the solar system becuase 99.9% we are the only intelligent life form in this solar sytem. We would have to travel to another solar system to find other intelligent beings. If I'm not mistaken, our technology is not that advanced yet to take us anywhere. Not even our own moon. Yes, we went once, but we havent been back since. And we have so many other planets in our solar system becuase more than likely yes, we are the only intelligent life form in this solar system and all those other planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars ect...) are waiting on us humans to come there and make them into what we need them to be; so that we can settle on them, praise God, be fruitful, and of course multiply :-)

Matthew 7 :3-And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Matthew 7 :4-Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

Matthew 7 :5-Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Answer 9

It's impossible for anything to live in space because of it's lack of oxygen and water.

Answer 10

That's not very nice of you to call people idiot just cause they're ignorant to something you obviously THINK you KNOW something about.