Quote:
Originally Posted by Matata
The moon also appears to be of identical size as the sun in the sky, as the sun is 400 times larger and 400 times further away (this one alone is so staggering improbable). The moon has a number of statistically impossible characteristics, and the summation of these characteristics is make it perfectly conducive to life on earth. I think the mere existence of the moon is the best evidence we have that life was seeded on earth by outside forces.
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This is something that fascinates me, not just about the moon but earth as well: that a lot of the statistically improbable quirks may have played a significant role in the development and evolution of life... okay, not the ratio between moon/sun size/distance, but a lot of other ones: the stability of the moon's orbit and its size, it's effects on tides, the fact that our planet is large enough to retain its molten core and thus magnetic field and protection from solar radition, just the perfect distance from the sun, just the perfect amount of surface water, etc.
You take all these unlikely things and add them together and the odds of our planet being perfect for life is *pun intended* astronomically unlikely. It's easy to see how someone can add it up and come to the conclusion that it couldn't possibly come about by chance. But this is looking at the likelihood backwards; it's irrelevant that it's *our* planet that has all of these characteristics.
Taken across the scale of not only our galaxy (which isn't special among the countless number of galaxies we've detected), but the scale of our observable universe, which may only be a fragment of the full universe, the existence of planets like ours seems almost inevitable. Even if the odds of our planet's particular life-supporting configuration is one-in-a-billion*, when you've got an estimated 10^25 planets in the observable universe, those one-in-a-billion odds are going to come up a lot... in fact they would come up 10^16 times. And that's only our particular life-supporting configuration. There may be other similarly rare configurations, that massively increase the total number of life-supporting planets.
And on each of those planets that actually support intelligent life, inhabitants at some point are likely to look at their planetary conditions, and conclude that these are so unlikely that they couldn't have come about by chance. And yet those slim chances within this incredibly large scale would make their own planetary configuration not just possible but a near certainty.
*My one-in-a-billion is a spitballed number... we don't have useful information yet on just how rare our particular configuration is, which makes exoplanet study one of the most fascinating areas of science right now. However, whether it's one-in-a-thousand or one-in-a-quadrillion doesn't really change much. You'd have to determine that the odds of particular life-supporting planetary configuration occuring are greater than 1 in 10^26 for our planet's existance to actually be unlikely, and that's only within our observable universe, which may be only a sliver of the full universe.