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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2013-11-05 01:06, spike wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal">OK now I am more puzzled than ever. <br>
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<br>
I share in the puzzlement. <br>
<br>
And remember, this is just earth-like planets - if life can function
in Europa-like oceans, ammonia, methane, liquid nitrogen, sulphuric
acid, or supercritical carbon dioxide solvents the number of
potential life-bearing worlds pushes up enormously. <br>
<br>
Say we assign only 1% chance to Europa-like reducing water
biospheres being possible, and given that Europa-like places look
slightly more common in the solar system than earthlike places, we
should expect a distribution with 99% probability of 8.8 potential
biospheres and 1% probability with up to 20 billion potential
biospheres. Now we can repeat for the other biospheres (with
weighting for the ranges of liquidity). The end result is that our
prior distribution of the number of potential biospheres likely
should look like an exponential distribution, with a mean
significantly higher than just 8.8 billion worlds. <br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University
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