Re: Relevant - Plate Tectonics Might Only Occur on 0.003% of Planets. That Makes Earth Very Special Indeed.

On Fri, 05 Jul 2024 15:33:40 -0600, John Savard
<quadibloc@servername.invalid> wrote:

On Fri, 05 Jul 2024 08:18:09 -0700, Paul S Person
<psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:
>

1. Certain people believe -- firmly, passionately, and religiously
believe -- that We Are Not Alone. This /must/ be true, they say, it
just /must/ be true.

>
That's not _too_ unreasonable a belief. After all, _we_ exist.
Therefore, it is possible for intelligent life to evolve, it is
possible for life to originate on a planet.

Life exists. Whether any of it deserves to be called "intelligent" is
a different question.

It is an assumption (OK, an hypothesis) that life originated on a
planet. That two different theories of what the initial conditions on
Earth were have been tested and shown to produce amino acids (or
whatever) shows only that it is possible to produce a theory that can
survive a laboratory test. That the initial conditions can be
different and the result the same suggests that we have no real idea
of what is needed at all.

So, if this is possible to happen naturally here, it's possible
elsewhere.
>
And the Universe is a very big place.
>
It's just that we have no way to know just _how_ "not alone" we are.
Are there hundreds of civilizations in the typical galaxy... or is our
civilization the only one, not only in this galaxy, but also for
hundreds of galaxies?
>
And in the latter case, if it's also true that faster-than-light
travel is utterly impossible... first contact may be a long way off.

Actual first contact is a long way off even if our own galaxy is
packed with space aliens. That's why we've cleverly decided which
radio frequency they are using to try to advise us of their presence.
Too bad nobody's using it.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"