[ExI] powers of ten

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:27 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>
> > Cool thanks John.  That’s part of one galaxy.  Now go into NASA’s Hubble
> ultra-deep sky views, and note that every one of those distant smudges of
> light is a galaxy like the one you just viewed in the link above:
>
> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/xdf.html
>

Yes it's very very big, but one thing we can say with virtual certainty is
that not only is there no intelligent life anywhere in that picture there
is no life of any sort in it. The picture was of things as they were less
than a billion years after the Big Bang so there was very little time for
Evolution to do it's work. Even worse there was no time for stars to cook
up the heavier elements that life needs like carbon nitrogen and oxygen.
When you look at the Hubble ultra-deep field you're looking at hydrogen and
helium and trace amounts of lithium and beryllium. And you just can't do
much interesting chemistry with nothing but that.


> > Nowthen my friends, I am not kidding.  There is just no damn way we are
> the only tech-enabled lifeform anywhere, just plain old no way.


Well... there have been hundreds of millions of species on the Earth in the
last 3.5 billions years but only one of them was tech-enabled, none of the
others even came close. And yes astronomy can certainly come come up with
some big numbers but so can biology. There are about 500 amino acids but
life only uses 20 of them, so there are 20^N ways of making a protein N
amino acids long. Most amino acids are about 100 amino acids long and some
are 5 times that long. There are only about 10^80 protons and electrons in
the entire observable universe.


> > there is just no way we are the only ones here.


I hope you're wrong, otherwise there is some catastrophe awaiting any
civilization that gets a little more advanced than ours.

 John K Clark
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