First images from Euclid are in

One proof is that we are thinking, and so are dogs, cats and monkeys to a lesser extent.

That's Earth. There is no model to say that life always goes on that way. We just have no clue.

"Astronomer Frank Drake created a formula to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way. Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan modified the equation to calculate the odds that Earth was the first intelligent life in the universe. They concluded that the odds of Earth being the first are less than one in 10 billion trillion, which suggests that other intelligent species have likely evolved."

1 in 10 billion trillion is some pretty serious odds.

It does get more complicated if we factor in life happening quickly enough without an extinction event.

But after looking at images like this there is just NO WAY we are the only ones.

I think there's a pretty compelling argument that could be made that matter assembling itself into conscious beings follows pretty naturally from life itself, given a long enough time horizon and assuming the properties of basic elements holds constant throughout the universe which seems pretty likely.

I don't really doubt that life with human-level (or greater) intelligence has evolved at least a few times.

What I'm more pessimistic about is how long such intelligence might live. How many civilizations reached a point of harnessing nuclear power and then wiped themselves out with nuclear war?

I think you fail to see the sheer probability just from the number of galaxies and the timeline itself where life can form and extinguish in even few million years. Every planet in the universe gets various amount of tries over eons

That 600 times zoom-in on 1% of the eventual survey of 1/3rd of the non milky way sky... Shows a couple of galaxies, which if the milky way is "typical" represent a couple of billion stars.

Suddenly 1 in 10 billion trillion odds doesn't seem so (and I apologise in advance for this) astronomical...

I think even that's perhaps a warped anthropocentric view of intelligence?

Think about other earth-centric scenarios, and try and imagine if dolphins or octopuses or fungus or maybe even insect colonies or plant ecosystems had "won" and become the apex lifeforms on earth instead of humans. I wonder just how different concerns like "civilisations" and "war" and "nuclear power" would have played out in those cases? I wonder if assumptions like "industrial revolutions" and the inevitability of scientific discovery being used in detrimental ways like we have done with nuclear science actually correlate with "intelligence"?

Typical galaxies the size of the Milky Way have 100 to 2,000 billion stars and could have as many as ten trillion planets.

That’s about 100^5, so one way to think of this is that if you categories these by any four properties (temperature, stability, hydration, day length) then you’d expect about 100 samples for any point in that 4D space.

So even if you believe Earth is unique along four critical metrics, there are about a hundred planets per galaxy that also have those attributes within a percentage point. If you allow some wiggle room then you have tens of thousands or even millions.

We know conditions here on Earth varied significantly more than 1% over billions of years and life survived and even thrived.

That’s hardly proof considering these examples all share a common ancestor. I ask you, can you communicate with a slime mold? Even the slime mold is more similar to ourselves than any potential life we’d find elsewhere, as we share a common ancestor.

And thats just how life on earth happened to iterate in recent terms. For most of the history of life on earth, it was unicellular. It could have just as easily remained a planet of unicellular life for another few billion years if it weren’t for a few chance mutations that happened to be slightly more competitive over the background.

FOH with that solipsistic nonsense

Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen.

I’m no physicist/biologist, but I always find it odd when they look for water on other planets to see “if life could exist”.

Sure, maybe that’s a requirement for the type of life we on earth know about, but I don’t see why other elements couldn’t have also formed in just the right way to be able to reproduce, and maybe eventually “think”.

What's so important about "sharing a common ancestor"? It doesn't say anything about the spread of different types of life that could evolve, considering we have a sample size of one, and it also says nothing about how difficult it is for any particular form to evolve intelligence.

The Drake Equation is a fun idea and all but I think it should go up there with Sagan's Nuclear Winter work as more thought experiment than reality.

It's just too arrogant to think we currently can place odds on all the important events necessary for us or something like us to come into being. At the time this equation was devised, I'm not even sure they understood how crazy lucky the development of mitochondria was.

In reality, we just don't know the many factors that might've affected our outcome. Also, it's just pure lottery falacy to reason about the statics that specifically "we" exist. If the odds for some strange reason settled out around about 1 of there being a single sentient species in our universe, that species would come to reason about itself and produce the same long odds of their existence. It's a longshot that a specific someone wins the lottery twice. It is a statistical inevitability that someone will win twice.

Whoever they are, they can't alienate themselves from being the one despite all the statistical huffing and puffing they can conjure. We will only know how special we are when we find another or once we have surveyed enough planets in depth.

It's not even clear that the ants haven't won.

But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a severe limit upon their complexity.

It's a matter of water being a great place for carbon based chemistry to occur. Why carbon? Because it is so dynamic. It readily forms complex molecules which interact in interesting ways.

Looking at other forms of chemistry we don't see much as naturally varying as carbon. Though I have heard some chemists and biologists hypothesize about sikicon based life. At high temperatures it forms the kinds of dynamic connections that carbon does.