Quote:
Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman
However, most of the people who have a professional-level knowledge of biology are definitely at the 'very low probability of life existing elsewhere' end of the spectrum of belief.......
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Biologists are absolutely the worst people to listen to in the discussion of life in the Universe, simply because their field is myopic, bound up in complexity. You can argue all you like about the complexity of biological processes and logically posit that life should be vanishingly rare (and hence we shouldn't exist either??). But a physicist can say, let's chuck a lot of star-stuff together, mix it up for a few billion years, and voila we have life. Where? Here! It didn't matter how complex the processes were, it happened! Right here in our own backyard, one backyard amongst countless similar backyards (as we are now understanding more and more). Physics can move backwards from the physical reality of life to unravel processes, while biology is mired in forwards moving processes, each of which presents a new layer of complexity (leading inevitably to impossibility!). Not that we'll ever understand life without both!
The universe creates and orders matter (what is matter LOL?) by processes we only have the crudest understanding of. Life is nothing more than another level of ordering of matter. One example is all that is necessary to know that the ordering of matter to create life is something that the universe does. We have that example.
Unfortunately human thinking is also influenced by religion - I don't mean we are all religious, but that our upbringings & exposure to religion or religious-type ideas colour our attitudes. "The Miracle of Life" etc. The idea that we are special, separate from the Universe in which we live. A hard hurdle to get over because it impacts on the meaning each of our lives has to us, regardless of how strenuously we may deny it.
As far as the probability of other life existing in the universe, the simplistic calculations of the biologists don't cut the mustard. What are the chances of a single hydrogen atom existing? Of putting together all the bits - different parts in different energy levels, let alone the constituent bits of the different parts, going down to who knows what at the fundamental/string theory particles level, all in their correct fuzzy places. Pretty damn small if you think of it as a random assemblage. And yet the universe has done it, abundantly, ubiquitously, profligately. Our lack of understanding of processes limits our ability to make meaningful predictions.
So we are left with only one certainty - that the universe creates life from star-stuff. Good enough for me!
Cheers -