Are We alone: Paul Davies comments (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 25, 2016, 13:04 (3103 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...-dhw: I think he is pointing out that the odds are irrelevant. We can't know unless we actually find alien life.
DAVID: No I think he makes the odds relevant because he openly questions are we alone, with a clear suggestion we might be. -He wrote: "I am often asked how likely it is that we will find intelligent life beyond Earth. The question is meaningless. Because we don't know the process that transformed a mish-mash of chemicals into a living cell, with all its staggering complexity, it is impossible to calculate the probability that it will happen. You can't estimate the odds of an unknown process.”-If you can't calculate the odds, the odds are irrelevant. -dhw: How would we know that a microbe was “alien”? Scientists are discovering new microbial species all the time as they explore different environments.-DAVID: Note two meanings to alien: 1) not from our group but the same as us; 2) totally differing life forms not following our biochemistry-Thank you for this clarification. He's presumably referring to 2), then. If it were 1), we would have no way of telling that they were “alien”.-dhw: 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.-DAVID: You miss a point: More than one colony of humans in the universe would take away from the specialness of this colony. Would Catholics accept that Jesus had several clones? Would the Jews like the fact that there are 'chosen' people all over the place? And so forth.-Why would intelligent alien life have to be clones of ourselves, or of Jesus or the Jews? If Davies is talking about life forms not following our biochemistry, they could hardly be human. But even if there were humans on other planets with their own religions, the theists could still argue that God made them, and Catholics, Jews and Muslims could simply add Cosmists, Jupitists and Martianists to their respective lists of those who have got it wrong!