Quote:
Originally Posted by retiredguy123
I don't view it as coincidences, but as probability. If you flip a coin 100 times, there is a very low probability that you will get 100 heads. But, if you flip the coin a trillion times, you are virtually guaranteed to get 100 heads in a row at least once.
The earth is 5 billion years old, but intelligent life has only existed for about 150,000 years. One reason that intelligent life is unlikely on another planet within our galaxy is that many of the planets in the galaxy cannot exist long enough for intelligent life to evolve. They are located in a congested area where they are destroyed by being bombarded by other larger objects. It takes millions of years with stable environmental conditions for life to evolve into an intelligent life form.
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Interesting point. But what guarantee is there that we'd even recognize other intelligent life if we saw it? In my opinion it is only Mankind's arrogance that allows him to believe we're so special as to be the ONLY intelligence in a universe so vast we've scarcely even begun to realize its size, if indeed we ever will. Heck. We don't even really know for sure that we're the only intelligent species on our own rock--or if other intelligent species existed in the billions of years before we came on the scene 200,000 years ago.
Think of it this way. We inhabit a nondescript rock rotating around a rather average star tucked away in a corner of a pretty average galaxy in...well, you get the picture. We're microscopic if even that. AND we exist in a rather narrow band called the "goldilocks zone" that maintains a temperature of only 450 degrees or so above absolute zero. Just about all of the other real estate in the universe is a lot hotter, or colder, or gassier than our little speck. There could be life far more intelligent than us even in our own solar system, but our extremely limited means of perception, at this time, is a guarantee we'll never become aware of it, or if we do it will be only after we do a whole not more growing and maturing as a species.
It is a fact that just about every tribe discovered in the Amazon, or Papua New Guinea, or Africa, or wherever that has not had contact with the outside world, views itself as the epitome of creation, with all other creatures (including other humans) as less than they are. What makes us, today, any different?