A 20th May 2020 news story at Columbia University by Carlo Cantor
reports on a new study by David Kipping, an assistant professor in
Columbia’s Department of Astronomy, in trying to estimate the probability
of life and intelligent life elsewhere by applying a statistical technique called Bayesian inference.
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Originally Posted by Carlo Cantor
Kipping’s conclusion is that if planets with similar conditions and evolutionary timelines to Earth are common, then the analysis suggests that life should have little problem spontaneously emerging on other planets. And what are the odds that these extraterrestrial lives could be complex, differentiated and intelligent? Here, Kipping’s inquiry is less assured, finding just 3:2 odds that intelligence is rare.
This result stems from humanity’s relatively late appearance in Earth’s habitable window, suggesting that its development was neither an easy nor ensured process. “If we played Earth’s history again, the emergence of intelligence is actually somewhat unlikely,” he said.
Kipping points out that the odds in the study aren’t overwhelming, being quite close to 50:50, and the findings should be treated as no more than a gentle nudge toward a hypothesis.
“The analysis can’t provide certainties or guarantees, only statistical probabilities based on what happened here on Earth,” Kipping said. “Yet encouragingly, the case for a universe teeming with life emerges as the favored bet. The search for intelligent life in worlds beyond Earth should be by no means discouraged.”
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Story here :-
https://news.columbia.edu/life-intel...ian-statistics
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Originally Posted by David Kipping, Columbia University Department of Astronomy
Does life’s early emergence mean that it would reappear quickly if we were to rerun Earth’s clock? If the timescale for intelligence evolution is very slow, then a quick start to life is actually necessary for our existence—and thus does not necessarily mean it is a generally quick process. Employing objective Bayesianism and a uniform-rate process assumption, we use just the chronology of life’s appearance in the fossil record, that of ourselves, and Earth’s habitability window to infer the true underlying rates accounting for this subtle selection effect. Our results find betting odds of >3:1 that abiogenesis is indeed a rapid process versus a slow and rare scenario, but 3:2 odds that intelligence may be rare.
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Research article at Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences entitled
"An objective Bayesian analysis of life’s early start and our late arrival" by David Kipping :-
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2.../12/1921655117
