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Quote:

Originally Posted by Crazy Jetty

First, I think *you* need to reread the article. I don't think you understood everything and may ghave gotten caught up in some of the wording.
For one, the article speaks of intellegent life.
Assuming that's excluding everything outside of human-like intellegence, it's an extremely limited view of the universe.
I'm not speaking exclusively of human-like intellegence. I'm talking about life, period. Aliens life forms are not limited exclusively to little grey men, klingons, or acid-blooded insects.

I've also heard this throery before, and it's heavily critisized and largely rejected. It carries an extremely narrow view of what is not only possible, but what is indeed likely. In his own calculations, everything needs to be exactly like earth. It requires a similar solarsystem, an identical sun, and a nearly identical planet. It requires a very slow rate of evolution, and it assumes that it "took" 4 billion years for us to evolve. Which is just insanely stupid, and shows he has very little understanding of evolution and bio diversity.
The universe is 13 billion years old. Stars lived and died before we came along.
Let's look at ourselves as the example like he does.
Earth is 4 billion years old. Life took hold perminalty a billion years ago.
Complex life on earth has existed for 500 million years.
Human ancestors came about 3 million years ago. Modern humans, and thus modern intellegence made the scene only a few thousand years ago.

Why? Why is this the rule for his model? Why does he assume it takes 4 billion years from point a to point b, just because humans were fasionably late?
There is no reason why an intellegent life form could have evolved before then. (In fact, if one really wants to get into detail, true intellegence has evolved several times on earth. Humans, cetaceans, cephalopods, elephants, and it's even believed troodontids achieved this level of intellegence) And indeed, he doesn't even state why it couldn't appear before then.

He also does not take into account Mars, which lived and died before life took hold on earth. A billion years from point a to point b was well within Mars' ability to produce life, before she died.

But even more insulting is his flawed calculations do not factor in LIFE ITSELF. Just human-like life. It does not factor in the Marses in the universe. It doesn't factor in the Europas. It doesn't factor in the unknown.

He also states straight off the bat that given an infinite and endless universe, life in it is *still* improbable.

The article is hokum.

It is supreme arrogance to believe life exists only on earth when even the finite universe is larger than the human mind can comprehend.
Life mathimatically exists elsewhere in the universe. And it may be as close as jupiter.

I disagree.

You stated that life on other planets was a mathmatical certainty and I provided you with a link to an article that shows that even if the universe were infinite (which it isn't) it would be unlikely.

Here is another article explaining why your assertion that it was a statistical given wasn't true:

The Drake Equation - How Many Alien Civilizations Exist in Our Galaxy?

And another, even more scientific one:

http://news.discovery.com/space/exop...cent-what.html

Personally, I'm not 100% convinced either way.

I don't think so though, and almost feel like belief in alien life as a given is just wishfull thinking.