[ExI] kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Sat Nov 9 13:11:58 UTC 2013


On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 9:12 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

I recommend reading "Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins" by
Robert Hazen for an overview of the clay model and a half dozen other
similar models.

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?
>

The truth is that without knowing the simplest non DNA heredity available,
we just don't know how difficult it is for life to evolve. The basic
building blocks of amino acids are readily available. But there are a few
orders of magnitude of increase in complexity between those and bacteria.
Something had to happen in between. And maybe it happened on mars. Who
knows?


> 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.
>

Me too.

-Kelly
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