How rare is life in our Universe?

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by Seattle, Jun 18, 2018.

  1. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    "Peace comes from within" - Gutama Buddha
     
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  3. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    From Kx00 Post 33
    Agreeing with SideShowBob: If you expect to find a copy of yourself, you will be disappointed.
     
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  5. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    I do expect life to exist elsewhere, but expect technological cultures to be rare, with most galaxies having none & few, if any, having more than one.
     
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  7. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I agree that infinity is actually just mathematical equations breaking down. I also agree that the conventional wisdom seems to suggest that you would keep repeating infinitely many times.

    I disagree with that however. The idea is that anything that did happen (and you did happen) will happen again and again. Shapes and colors has nothing to do with it however.

    All change doesn't have to occur over and over. Entropy is still ongoing and therefore change would be infinite as well so you could argue that you would never occur again for that reason alone.

    However I don't think that infinity actually exists in nature. As a practical matter you wouldn't be able to travel though infinity to find yourself anyway so whether it happened or not could not be knowable and that's functionally the same as it not happening.
     
  8. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    In my belief we come from something called Heaven "always before," in contrast to ever after. And that's all that ever happened and that is what will happen.
     
  9. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    From Kx00 Post 32
    An infinite set need not include duplicates. Two examples:

    The counting numbers are infinite & include no duplicates.

    The real numbers are a higher order infinite set & include no duplicates.​
    Also note.
    Identical twins have different finger prints & have other differences. If identical twins are not actually identical, it is surely erroneous to believe that two less related individuals are identical to each other.
    Most people have invalid notions about infinity & infinite sets. Cantor (first name Greg, I think) wrote an essay about infinite sets. That essay does a good job of dealing with notions about infinity.

    BTW: Few folks know the formal definition of an infinite set.

    An infinite set is a set which can be put into a one to one correspondence with a subset of itself.

    Example for the integers: (1, 2) (2, 4), (3, 6) . . . . . (n, 2n) Each member of the set of integers corresponds to a member of the set of even integers.​
     
  10. gebobs Registered Member

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    Rarer still will be the technological culture occurring simultaneously with ours. If we have anything to fear from other technological cultures, it's grey goo.
     

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