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A comment on Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016). Parent comment

Re:Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previ... by citation_please on Thursday January 04, 2018 @07:38AM (#16069875)
I believe the post above was working out math that would make it so the probability would be 1 / #(of planets in the universe), which, following the law of large numbers, would mean that given an infinite number of universes, those universes would tend to have exactly one planet (Earth in our universe's case) that would have life.
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Re:Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previ... by Buttons840 on Thursday January 04, 2018 @12:56PM (#16072399)
In other words, the odds of there being life elsewhere in the universe is:

a very large number of planets * a very small chance of life forming = ???

We don't really know how small the chances of life are. It may be that the chances of life forming are so small it dwarfs the number of planets in magnitude. It may be an incredible miracle that we live.

It seems that whenever an article says "there are more planets than we expected", someone concludes "this makes it more likely that there is life somewhere out there", but it's also fair to conclude that "this means the odds of life forming are lower than we previously thought" since we haven't actually found any other life. As Fermi asked, where is everybody?

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