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Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman
The fact that highly informed people disagree strongly about the odds of life existing elsewhere in the universe, suggests that the best approach is to actually do the experiment and to look out there for life.
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....... It seems that it is usually the SETI crowd and the 'passionate believers' who publicize the most wildly optimistic estimates about the odds of life existing in the rest of the universe; after all, their job depends on projecting an optimistic attitude.
Has Cox completed at least a few units of cellular and molecular biology at university? If not, I suggest that his views about the prevalence of life in the universe should be given little weight. You really need to have some tertiary biology to appreciate how 'super high tech' life really is.
An extremely detailed, but clearly written, discussion of the highly-multiple steps that have to be taken for complex organic molecules to organize themselves into a simple self-replicating life-form, can be found in :
"Life's Solution : Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe"
by Simon Conway-Morris
(Cambridge University Press)(Published 2004 and 2003)
(incidentally, some of the author's theological views do creep in to this book, but the scientific argument itself is impeccable)
The probability for the occurrence of all of the reactions that need to occur, in the very long chain of chemical reactions that leads eventually to the construction of a simple organic lifeform, is vanishingly small;
The gap in complexity between simple organic chemistry and the chemistry of a very simple lifeform like a bacterium..... is absolutely enormous.
This suggests, at the minimum, that the environmentalist ideology of 'reverence for life' and dismay at the destruction of species, may be justified on scientific grounds; life may be so rare in the universe that the nearest occurence of life away from our Solar System could be billions of light years away.
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P.S.
What is life? Nobody knows!!
But read the introductory book "What is Life?" by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan.
This is the book that got me interested in serious study of biology.
Margulis was a controversial biologist who had a brilliant and clear writing style that is very suited to clearly explaining the extraordinary complexities of life. I don't think that physicists like Cox really understand all of the 'observables' when it comes to life....it really takes a few years of full-time study to come to grips with this.
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the probability of other life existing in the universe is high in my opinion.Its is just plain silly to claim that life has low probabilty of existing elsewhere.This is just plain "we are at the centre of the universe "type thinking.
It is a statisitical probabilty that life has got to exist elsewhere in the universe.Its like saying no one can ever win powerball or lotto because the probabilty of the event occuring is too low.But someone is always winning it and beating the extremely high odds and getting rich instantly.