Quote:
Originally Posted by PiracyPitbull
The opinion of those people is not something that concerns my beliefs regarding universal statistics of life or intelligent life existence at all.
Simply because, they are still people theorizing with an understanding of the life and lifeforms of our own environment but they're theorizing about life and environments they are unable to observe, have never been to and are light years away. It's an interesting exercise of course but, considering the immense magnitude of even earths "very immediate neighborhood" I doubt any person that thinks critically gives such opinions any gravity.
A Light year, for example....it's so often trivialized but, to put it into perspective the sheer expanse of our immediate door step, the unmanned Voyager 1 still requires another 17,500 years travel at its current velocity to reach the distance required for just one light year (current travel: 40 years and 11 billion miles).
So another 17500 years and Voyager will still have not reached one quarter of the distance to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri. And where were humans all those years ago, we'd just started creating pottery.
So I don't get overly concerned about earth bound theories on intelligent life existence within a 500 billion galaxy universe which is 93 billion light years in diameter. I really don't 
I'm going to stand by the mathematical certainty, simply because statistics fully favor a rational belief.
There are several trillion statistical instances to be right about intelligent life as oppose to a detractors belief where (even if the largely incomprehensible universal statistics can boggle anyone's mind) they would still need to nullify several trillion instances for those who do believe to be wrong.
And those who accept the statistics only need (apart from our own planet of course) another one in a couple of trillion to be correct.
I'll take those odds as a certainty any day of the week. |
Look, I'm not trying to change opinions here. I know it seems that way due to how articulate I can state my opinions. You're going with the odds and that's a fair position, that's why I don't play the lottery, because I understand odds. But this is science, not vegas and it's odd to me to hear you describe the fact that scientists/anyone who gives the slightest plausibility to us being alone are lacking critical thinking because they don't apply vegas odds rules to studying science.
by applying new critical thinking to the fact that there is an overwhelming LACK of evidence allows science in its entirety to learn more about us, science, our world, the visible universe and more. We have everything to gain and nothing to lose by exploring the question from both sides.
By asking why hasn't the question been answered at all allows science to investigate the issue in new light, ask new questions, rephrase questions, look elsewhere, look differently. In other words, learn more.
In short, being open to the answer and investigating the issue from another angle is the essence of critical thinking.