I said the following, which is almost exactly what you said, except for the “only possible outcome” clause:
Why do you claim that it must be the only possible outcome?
Do you agree or disagree that this scenario is unlikely and opportune:
Must we first calculate all of the probabilities involved, or are there instances where we can intuit that something exceptional has occurred?
I think of the old joke where Jesus, God and Moses are golfing. God tees off, the ball hits a tree, bounces off and hits a turtle, bounces off and hits a rock, bounces off and lands on the back of a bird, the ball falls onto the green where a squirrel picks it up and carries it to the hole and drops it in. Moses says, “Are you going to mess around or play golf?”
The important part is “you look at the results after they are created”.
That would be the claim being made by you and @MStrauss, from what I have seen. If there are many different arrangements of a planet and its satellites that can produce and support life then it severely weakens the argument, does it not?
I agree that you haven’t shown any probability calculates for the likelyhood of there being a solar system capable of producing complex life. We would have to know this number before we make any claims about the Earth being likely or unlikely. All we have is your bare assertion that it is unlikely.
I don’t see this as being the case at all. To say that this is the only possible outcome would certainly conflict with your example above. There may be many, many ways in which planet/satellite arrangements could foster life on a planet.
What I have continued to ask, and no one seems to want to answer, is can we not look at the details surrounding this collision and see it as remarkable? What’s the problem with that? No one who agrees that it is remarkable has to agree that the Hand of God caused it. That opinion is outside of science.
I agree it’s unlikely and opportune when considering a single planet.
I do not agree that it’s unlikely or opportune given an entire universe of planets and the knowledge that there is a planet to which it happened.
Great. Thanks for the reply. So, we agree that, when looking at our planet, the collision event appears to be a special one. (Unlikely and opportune, at least.)
So, it would be really helpful, at @T_aquaticus says, to have data showing how special. But, given that I don’t have that data, let’s move on to the second part of your response… Since the universe is so enormous, and there are undoubtedly many planets surrounding many stars, is this event really “unlikely and opportune” or not?
I would argue that having many more opportunities may not decrease the unlikeliness (or in-opportunity) of the event. At the very least, the same data that @T_aquaticus wanted me to provide as proof would need to be provided by you. The reason being, as has been said, we cannot know how unlikely this event is without more data. Therefore, we cannot say how likely this event is, either. We can only look at this event from our perspective and intuit whether or not it seems to be unlikely.
In order to truly know whether it is universally unlikely, we need that data. If a genetic disorder exists that affects one in every billion people, we know that around seven people will be affected. If we discover a genetic disorder, and we don’t know how widespread is the issue, we cannot say, for certain, how rare or common it may be.
So, as I said early on, it seems fair to suggest that this collision seems to be unlikely and opportune, and it could be an indication of meddling, but no one can state claim this as proof.
In principle everything could be “explained” by the weak anthropic principle. But of course, as has been pointed out, that is similar to the “sharpshooter paradox” and doesn’t really explain anything.
Wouldn’t this argue against the idea that the features of the Moon in the article are unlikely?
I think everything in the solar system is remarkable, and I don’t see how the origin of the Moon sticks out in any way. I would actually put the rings of Saturn above the Moon on my list of remarkable things.
No, not at all. That it is unlikely is not dependent upon there being no other possibilities. If you find a dollar under your pillow when you wake up in the morning, it is likely that someone put it there. The Tooth Fairy and a million other unlikely causes exist. That there are multiple unlikely causes does not affect how unlikely the Tooth Fairy explanation would be.
That’s fine. I respect that. It is an opinion as was mine. I just wish that someone would admit that my opinion, too, is valid as an opinion.
Then what exactly makes the Moon unlikely? You could argue that every single planet and satellite in our solar system are unique in some way, and all would be equally unlikely. When there are nearly an infinite number of ways that a solar system can be made, all outcomes, no matter what they are, are unlikely. Mars is unique for having the largest known volcanoe in the solar system. Venus is unique for having a surface with molten lead. Saturn is unique for having its ring system. Jupiter is unique for having a giant red spot. Uranus is unique for having an extreme tilt and the fastest winds in the solar system. I could go on and on about the unique features for every planet, because every planet and every moon has them. All of these unique features are unlikely.
Actually the calculation has been done by Hugh Ross and the probability of finding a planet like the earth in the visible universe even given the 10^22 or so planets is something like on in over 10^300. The probability calculation is available on the web.
This is a very good point, and fair. There are many remarkable things that could potentially be seen as being unlikely. I love Venus and the molten lead… what a scene that must be!
This is fine. I have only said that it was so.
In this article from 2004, he calculated that the odds of finding a “life support body,” even including a satellite orbiting another planet, as a host for complex life to be just 1 in 10.282 So it does not seem that it was just an “earth-like planet.”
It also seems like a massive guessing game. Ross’ “Probability that feature will fall in the required range for physical life” simply isn’t known with any certainty. We don’t even know if a moon is required for a planet to have complex life, as one example.
Are there other studies of which you are familiar that are less of a guessing game and show more conclusively that life supporting bodies are ubiquitous?
There are footnotes to sources for each of the points. I’ve not read the sources, but I’m guessing that these numbers were not merely plucked out of space, but that they have a basis in research data.
I don’t know of any such studies. I have yet to read any study which can confidently calculate all of the possible types of planets where complex life can evolve. We have one example of a planet that has complex life. That isn’t a large enough pool to make any extrapolations.
I think we sere using the sharpshooter paradox to explain why rejecting the weak anthropic principle (WAP) would be a mistake.
WAP does have some explanatory power. For example, it explains why none of the other planets in the solar system have intelligent life, and whe we have not found it in the universe.
That is an important qualifier. How big do you estimate the non-visible universe is? How many times larger than the visible universe is the non-visible universe?
With the flatness of space arising from cosmic inflation, wouldn’t it be hundreds of orders of magnitude bigger? Perhaps some of the other @physicists might help figure this one out.
@Mike_Strauss, what are your thoughts on this article by Seigel?
It’s possible that the Universe, where inflation occurred, barely attained a size larger than what we can observe. It’s possible that, any year now, the evidence for an “edge” to where inflation happened will materialize. But it’s also possible that the Universe is googols of times larger than what we can observe. Until we can answer these questions, we may never know.
A googol is 10^{100}.
If life as rare in the universe as Ross calculated, and rose by some fluke event, we might expect to find what we now see. A gigantic universe without a border that is devoid of all life but our own.
Finding life on other planets, especially if they are nearby us, well that would challenge the WAP, it seems. The fact we only have one example of a living planet seems to fit its predictions. What am I missing?
We don’t know, but it is usually considered to be infinite. Regardless of the size of a single Universe, with inflationary multiverse theory, there can also be an infinity of universes within the multiverse. This gives rise to the measure problem in cosmology. These two quotes from wikipedia illustrate the problem:
In a single universe, cows born with two heads are rarer than cows born with one head. [But in an infinitely branching multiverse] there are an infinite number of one-headed cows and an infinite number of two-headed cows. What happens to the ratio?
Say there are an infinite number of universes in which George W. Bush became President in 2000, and also an infinite number in which Al Gore became President in 2000. To calculate the fraction N(Bush)/N(Gore), we need to have a measure — a way of taming those infinities.
In terms of the origin of life, one can say: “A universe with life is much rarer than a universe that is devoid of life, but how do we compute the ratio N(life)/N(no life)?” Note that in an infinite multiverse, both the numerator and denominator is infinity. Without first answering this question, the whole fine-tuned universe argument is meaningless.
No. I do not agree that it’s unlikely or opportune given an entire universe of planets and the knowledge that there is a planet to which it happened.
Are you actually arguing that having additional opportunities for a possible but unlikely event to happen does not increase the probability that it happens at least once?