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Comment by fzeindl | Hacker News Reader

I once heard: „The universe is unbelievably huge and unbelievably old so rare events happen all the time.“

I think it meant that even if life started itself accidentally by some unbelievably slim chance, this could happen somewhere else as well simply because the dice are rolled that often.

I think time is the factor here. When you take into account not only the size of the universe but also it‘s age, the chance that life started somewhere, somewhen and ended long ago could be larger than zero, even if we are not able to calculate it.

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All dimensions are a factor. Life could exist on different time-scales (e.g. it moves so slow we thought it was inanimate). It could exist on different physical-scales (be so large we don't realize we are a part of it). Or, it could exist on an entirely different plane of existence (on a desolate planet in a shard of silicon that is turing complete and quietly simulating its own recursive universe).

> be so large we don't realize we are a part of it

While these are valid and interesting ideas from science fiction, I personally doubt that there's some fundamental property about human life that we haven't noticed yet, like some fundamental connection to other matter.

Simply because there's no evidence that our primitive understanding about what is life, has fundamentally changed in history. I guess a few thousand years ago people understood that we, plants and animals are alive and rocks are not and we still think the same. (nature religions aside)

So if there was no shift in understanding for such a long time, why should we now realize we are part of something a part from an eco system?

I think it meant that even if life started itself accidentally by some unbelievably slim chance, this could happen somewhere else as well simply because the dice are rolled that often.

That might be true, but we have no basis the probability of how rare life is so we can't say it is. We may assume the probability is high enough that it happens often in trillions of chances, but if the probability is one in a quintillion then we're simply wrong.

Humans are incredibly bad at thinking about both probability and thinking about large numbers, so when we combine the two we're likely to be quite wrong.

Almost certainly there is more life out there somewhere. But if the level of rarity is “for every billion years, it happens once in every thousand galaxies” rare, then unless FTL travel is real humanity will probably never get to see it. And until we see a second example, we can’t begin to calculate the level of rarity.

But it’s also not like we’ve looked at enough of our galaxy to say it’s rare either. We just don’t know.

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