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Life Out There
Why life on Earth may be anomalous
A major problem we humans face when we try to estimate the probability of Earth-like life emerging elsewhere in the universe is our tendency to extrapolate from whatever situation we find ourselves in rather than attempting to understand the complex interplay of many different factors. That’s one reason why so many experts end up making catastrophically inept predictions: even people who know a lot about a subject still remain trapped within standard human cognitive biases.
We see this limitation when considering the question of what sorts of life may exist outside of the Earth’s biosphere. Setting aside sci-fi entertainments, which contain no sci and very little fi, we see there’s often an argument made on the basis of crude extrapolation. The argument runs something like this:
There are around a hundred billion (10¹¹) stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and it seems from what we know so far than most of these suns will have planets orbiting them, albeit in configurations we never imagined when we simply extrapolated from our own solar system. Therefore, with all those suns and all those planets surely complex life has evolved many times and therefore surely intelligent tool-making life has probably evolved as well. Factor in all the other galaxies in the observable universe and it becomes a “certainty” that…
