[ExI] kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 1:06 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> OK now I am more puzzled than ever.  NASA says there are about 8.8
> billion Goldilocks planets in the Milky Way alone:
> http://news.yahoo.com/study-8-8-billion-earth-size-just-planets-212232920.html
>
>

Well, 8.8*10^9 is a big number but that alone doesn't tell you anything,
the real question is if chemistry and biology can generate numbers as big
or bigger that can counteract astronomy's numbers.  A chain of 20 amino
acids is too short to be considered a protein, but there are 20 different
types of amino acids in earthly life so there are 1.05*10^26 different ways
to make such a little chain. So already we have a number ten million
billion times larger than 8.8*10^9. And even bacteria are "astronomically"
more complex than such a simple 20 element peptide chain. And we aren’t
just talking about any old type of life, we're talking about life that can
make advanced technology, and so we must add yet another layer of big
numbers and "astronomical" complexity.

> I must reluctantly conclude that we are missing something fundamental,
>

I think one of the fundamental things we don't understand very well is how
life originated. In fact as far as we know right now, even the entire
observable universe is FAR too small to have made the existence of the
simplest known bacteria likely. And natural selection couldn't reduce the
odds until heredity was invented, only then do Darwin's ideas come into
play.  So life simply can't exist, and yet it does, so we're missing
something. Graham Cairns-Smith and his clay hypothesis have some very
interesting ideas and could be the first step toward explaining it, maybe,
but we need a lot more evidence.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe it will turn out that biology's big numbers
can't equal astronomy's and life is common, then another mystery arises,
how likely is the Evolution of intelligence? Technology only started about
10,000 years ago, and for over 85% of life's 3.8 billion year existence on
Earth it was satisfied with nothing but one celled organisms. Why the
sudden change?

Or maybe the reason we don't see ET is that some principle puts a lid on
how smart something can be and how much cosmic engineering that can be done
by it, my best guess on why that could be is that having access to your
emotional control panel might lead to positive feedback and mental
instability.  I hope that's not the answer, I hope the answer is just that
the numbers from biology are bigger than the numbers from astronomy.

  John K Clark
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