Are We alone: Paul Davies comments (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 24, 2016, 13:45 (3107 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: He points out the enormous odds against it:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/maybe-life-in-the-cosmos-is-rare-after-a...-I think he is pointing out that the odds are irrelevant. We can't know unless we actually find alien life.-QUOTE: "Maybe we don't need to look far. If life really does pop up readily, as Sagan suggested, then it should have started many times on our home planet. If there were multiple origins of life on Earth, the microbial descendants of another genesis could be all around us, forming a sort of shadow biosphere. Nobody has seriously looked under our noses for life as we do not know it. It would take the discovery of just a single “alien” microbe to settle the matter."-I don't quite follow this. How would we know that a microbe was “alien”? Scientists are discovering new microbial species all the time as they explore different environments.-David's comment: Davies suggestion that we look for alien life here has been made before. To me Davies comment about the sun's age and the timing of the appearance of life before the sun blows up (and it will in about 5 billion years), is a very telling point and more evidence of fine tuning of a different type than the physical constants. Note his recognition that forming organic molecules is very difficult. I have included most of his essay. The only thing he and I don't agree upon is God.-Whether we found alien life or not wouldn't make any difference to either side. Theists could claim that God naturally made more than one experiment, and atheists would continue to claim that life arose spontaneously.