News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by zoklet-enjoyer on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @03:20PM (#43474808)
Out of the dozens of planets in the universe, Earth is not likely to be so unique that it is the only place where life has arisen.
Re:The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by rytill on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @04:13PM (#43475414)
Dozens? Don't you mean, probably hundreds of trillions in the observable universe? Not that the number of planets really implies anything when we don't know the probability of life arising on one of them.
Re:The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by zoklet-enjoyer on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @04:28PM (#43475579)
No. I meant dozens. Hundreds of trillions is dozens
Re:The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @05:25PM (#43476160)
I don't doubt that you intended this meaning but doesn't that seem unnecessarily ambiguous to you? Usually when people say "dozens" they mean some small handful of dozens with an absolute number probably smaller than 200 (otherwise most would say "hundreds"). Few people are going to think "hundreds of trillions" when someone says "dozens". If one is expected to think "hundreds of trillions" in this case, it seems they should be equally expected to think "hundreds of quadrillions" which would be incorrect here.

Even if one agrees that "dozens" is accurate to mean "hundreds of trillions" it still misses the mark for the argument because the odds come from the high number of planets. That is to say, there are very low odds that any individual planet harbors life but ostensibly much greater odds that one planet in a set of planets harbors life. Saying "hundreds of trillions" gets that point across better than "dozens".

Re:The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by zoklet-enjoyer on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @05:27PM (#43476178)
I had no idea if the number of planets was estimated to be in billions or trillions and I wasn't going to look it up. So I went with dozens.
Re:The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by pfdietz on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @03:49PM (#43475130)
This statement doesn't seem to follow from anything. Why is Earth "not likely to be so unique"?
Re:The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by zoklet-enjoyer on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @04:32PM (#43475619)
Re:The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by pfdietz on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @07:17PM (#43477123)
It's weird you think that link settles things. A planet could be Earth-like without having life. We don't know how likely life is to arise on an Earth-like planet. In particular, we cannot conclude that because we are here, the probability of it happening on Earth was high, due to observer selection bias.

https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/W6-Observer-sele...