Far be it for me to question you on statistics kabbes, but surely because it happened here, it isn't at all inconceivable, it did happen. And if it happened once, given the right circumstances, it could conceivably happen again where the circumstances are also right.
Many tiny steps have taken place in the evolution of life as we know it today ...
otoh, to be close enough to get liquid water, you're probably going to be tidally locked. Wiki has a page with pros & cons: Habitability of red dwarf systems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What about wormholes and shit? Do you know something I don't? As far as I am aware, they are firmly in the realms of speculation. Meanwhile, there's pretty firm reasons to believe that you can't transmit information faster than the speed of light. It would fuck up causality, for a start.
It's my understanding that red dwarf stars have significantly greater magnetic fields, with respect to their size, than stars like our sun. This would lead to more energetic solar flares, which when combined with a much closer habitable zone, may impede the emergence of life. Although I think the magnetic activity does diminish over time (billions of years). So I agree that, especially given their tremendous longevity & abundance, smaller stars offer great hope for life to get a foothold, but it may be that in many cases it's simply too soon. It's always possible that life emerging around a star like ours is exceptionally rare, and that when you look at the big picture, over hundreds of billions of years, it's the little stars (once they've calmed down a bit) that will ultimately provide the best opportunities for life to emerge. We may not have heard from ET yet because we're the anomaly - one of the early pioneers - and most galactic life might appear in the far future.
Gives us plenty of time to board the Starship Enterprise ..
(another username of mine btw)
Unlikely plus time = inevitable.
Oh god, no. No, no, no. Not unless you are talking infinite time, which we are not here.
I should have said 'enough time' to be completely accurate.
That's possible, but people talk as if it is inevitable given then time period in question. But given the extreme numbers involved, it could as well be overwhelmingly unlikely to have developed even once as to be inevitable to have happened (let alone multiple times)
And we know from the sample point of one that enough time has passed for it to occur in this universe - in second/third generation star systems with abundant heavier elements around. I don't see the basis for your ideas about unlikelihood. It's just as possible that life was rather slow to get going here given the conditions.
A sample point of one means nothing other than the fact that it wasn't impossible, though. It could be that even given every planet in existence, it was still only a million-to-one shot that it would happen once, but that million-to-one shot just happened to come off. We just don't know. Or it could be that the odds are good on it happening multiple times. Or a thousand times. Again, we don't know. But I have noticed a trend towards people assuming the latter and discarding the former as wrong a priori. There is no basis for that assumption.
It would be good to know how many times life started on Earth. It seems most scientists think there was a Last Universal Common Ancestor to all living things. But that doesn't mean there weren't others that lost out. I don't quite see how life can evolve just the once. Now that would be staggeringly unlikely. Rather, each stage will likely have had multiple competing candidates.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting single cellular life is anywhere near so unlikely. But multi-cellular life is so many orders of magnitude more unlikely that it having happened lots of times is far less obviously inevitable as people make out
Sounds like solipsism, frankly. It isn't obvious that current life is more complex than life from a million years ago, for example. It's just different. Meanwhile, there is still that billion years in which nothing happened to consider.
He works up from principles found in the chemistry of self-replication, something that exists outside life forms as well.
