(Alien) Life Redux, Etc: What Exactly Are the Odds?

 (Alien) Life Redux, Etc: What Exactly Are the Odds?

 

This is an essay that I republish every once in a while, usually after seeing some alien-related copy somewhere on the ‘net. This time, I have two additional pieces of evidence (ok, maybe not evidence, but two strongly supportive quotes by an American and a British scientist who definitely check off some of the ethos boxes for credibility. Onward:

 

It's a romantic notion- alien life- but maybe it's just that- a notion. And here is why I'm starting to think that maybe there really is no life anywhere else in the universe:

 

Pure probability.

 

A monkey at a typewriter has a one in 15 billion chance in typing the word "banana" in its lifetime. Why so little a chance? Well, let's say a typewriter has 50 keys, and each key has an equal chance of being pressed by our monkey friend. The chance that the first letter typed would be a "B" is 1/50. The chance that the second letter typed would be an "A" is also 1/50, and on and on.

 

Statistics tell us that the chance of the first six letters spelling "banana" is:

 

(1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) ×

(1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) =

1/15,625,000,000,

or roughly a one in 15 billion chance.

 

And that's for only six things that have to happen just to spell the word "banana." 

 

Now, let's conservatively say that 10 things have to line up out of a 1,000 for life to occur (way, way conservative). That would be:

(1/1,000) x (1/1,000) x (1/1,000) x

(1/1,000) x (1/1,000) x (1/1,000) x

(1/1,000) x (1/1,000) x (1/1,000) x

(1/1,000)= 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or roughly a 1 in one thousand billion billion billionth of a chance.

 

When I hear someone say that the odds of there NOT being life elsewhere are very minute, I think of the above formula, and I think that it might in fact be the opposite.

Further, British mathematician/astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle once observed that the prospect of higher life forms spontaneously emerging is comparable to the probability of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 from the materials it finds.

American biologist Edwin Conklin made a similar observation: “The likelihood of life arising from chance is comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary being produced by an explosion in a printing factory.”

 

Before you launch into how big the universe is, think about the numbers above, the tornado in a junkyard, and the unabridged dictionary explosion, and think that probably of those elements that need to come together for life to happen, such as the numbers in the above monkey model, are probably more like a hundred thousand things out of a million, as opposed to ten out of a thousand.

 

As I read back my essay, I realize that the proofs I have presented actually work against me as well—that just because the universe is that big, with that many elements needing to come together at one specific point in time—doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. Unlikely, improbable, incredible—most definitely. Impossible, no.

Yes, these are the things that I think of for inspiration.

Strangely, they work...

© Ray Cattie