http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7351428.stm

and find myself finding all kinds of flaws in the logic of the lead researcher as well as glimmers of hope (if there's only .01% chance of intelligent life times the bajillions of possible planets...there's still a lot of other life out there in the universe, right? right???)

I'll disagree, and then go put on my tinfoil hat again. My fillings are singing to me again for some reason.

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"The view that evolution involves a predictable progression, such that the emergence of intelligence is inevitable, is today generally considered to be overly anthropocentric.

"Any directionality to evolution; and, in general, the kind of outcome seen on Earth may be vanishingly unlikely.

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With obfuscation like this I'm surprised that journalists understood it. Maybe they didn't. I think it means that he's calculated the probability that some other race evolves exactly as we did.

There's no reason to suppose that ours is the only way of evolving intelligent life (if, indeed, we are intelligent). Just because we didn't meet any little green aliens yet doesn't mean they don't exist. It's a logical non-sequitur to say that we evolved this way, therefore all intelligent life evolves this way. If that were true the Earth would be full of intelligent monkeys.

His calculations are about evolution our way, and say nothing about the possible evolution of little green men, intelligent lizards, or Daleks or Klingons.

I don't remember who it was, it may have been Sagan, who had an interesting idea about this. The idea is that even if civilizations are present throughout the universe, the chance of any one of them finding another is very small. A civilization must be around for a long time before their technology allows for space travel - even now we have yet to land a man on a planet. Because of the immense distances involved and the high state of technology required for space travel, it is probable that any given civilization will become extinct before they can in any meaningful way travel through the universe in search of other civilizations. Should they survive until they have such means, the chance of their extinction before finding another civilization is still very probable. The idea is that civilizations, if they are out there, simply don't last long enough to find one another.

Isaac Asimov wrote something on the chances of civilizations existing. He used the presuption of averages. We are an average planet, have the average chances of having a moon orbiting it, the chances of the planet being in the right general orbits are average, our sun being rather average, and so on. His conclusions were that there were a number of civilizations in the stars at any one time, and even more in the universe. He even included civlizations blowing each other up and life having to recover to develop from it.
At the time, it was pretty good, but now I question a few of his assumptions.
Just change one assumption and the odds either improve drastically or end entirely when predicting the chances of civilizations.

quote:
"The view that evolution involves a predictable progression, such that the emergence of intelligence is inevitable, is today generally considered to be overly anthropocentric.

"Any directionality to evolution; and, in general, the kind of outcome seen on Earth may be vanishingly unlikely.

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Take an intelligent Creator out of the equation and the statistics become pretty grim.

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It seems to me that he's mostly making the case that it's very unlikely for us to ever find other intelligent life. Which, I think we already knew.

But to suggest there isn't other intelligent life out there in the universe somewhere, that's nonsense. It's as inconclusive as "Is God real?" There's a true answer to both questions, but nobody on earth can know it. Both lakcing control, to the extreme, and so a scientific approach is absolutely useless, leaving the matter to personal belief and opinion.

After all, even the darkest spot in the sky conceals billions of galaxies. And if you wnat to talk probability, the probability that humanity would evolve and develop was exceptionally low. But we did. And the probability of you being here is lower still, and exact sperm matched to an exact egg. Probability is a useless measure in situations like this.

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Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

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:-) Nice juxtaposition of current(ish) events.

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Oh my lord...you actually found an instance of Clarke being right about something! Congratulations!

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He's the only SF writer I can recall who was ever right about something.

Science is about reproducible results. Experimentation. Prediction based on evidence and data, and then observation to verify those predictions. All four "critical steps" or whatever this scientist calls them suffer from EXTREME low number statistics. To be more precise, he is generalizing from exactly ONE case: Earth.

Now if, one day, scientists have studied the evolution or lack thereof of life on 100 very-similar-to-earth type planets, then at least our statistics should be roughly right, to a factor of 10% or so.

So far, all we know is that for Earth there is a 100% liklihood that intelligent life did, in fact, develop. Generalizing 1-instance of something into a universal trend has a +/- 100% margin of error, so speculating on it is absolutely pointless.

Now in some areas, science IS actually progressing. We are beginning to spot many extra-solar system planets, and where scientists had always presumed that our model of inner rocky plants and outer gas giants was "the norm" our first observations were nothing of the sort, instead finding giant hot jupiter-like planets at orbits like Mercury's distance from their stars. So sometime in the forseeable future, we might have good statistics on the liklihood of a star having an earth-like planet in a habitable zone.

But we still would need to observe enough earths to predict how often single cells emerge. We would need to observe enough cases to actually know how likely single cells turn multi-cell, etc. etc.

It's true...
Mean Scientists Dash Hopes Of Life On Mars

The world needs us SF writers!

To clarify though: the scientist is not saying there never was or will be intelligent life on other planets. He is saying in our small slice of time the chances are low. It is an educated guess.

Sure statistics are unreliable but before an actual theory is invented or life is found it is all we will have.

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scientist claims somewhere between a 0-100% chance of E.T. life

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What this guy is saying is there is a 0.01% chance of finding intelligent life. Why? Because we would need to find a planet that fits requirements A, B, C and D.

The important part is he's identified the requirements, now instead of spending time looking at all planets that fit requirements A,B or B,D people can triage the billions of stars and start at the most likely places.

Does he mean we should not go into space? That we can be as electromagnetically messy as we like because nobody's going to detect us and come visiting with menace? That SETI programmes should be abandoned?

Here's what I think. The scientific method involves proposing a theory, then devising an experiment to prove or disprove it. Let's go and test his theory. Let's go to the stars and count intelligent life-forms.

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For me the question is, why does he care? What can we do with this theory?

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It really depends on how the study was taken.

If we were to compare the ocean and plankton to the galaxy and intelligent life then we could replicate the process.

I would take a glass of water from the ocean and examine it for plankton. I would then take a glass of water from another section of the ocean far-far-away and examine it. I would continue to do this to the extent of my abilities.

This would tell me:

1: The % of chances of finding plankton in a given area of the ocean

2: The common aspects of plankton, the variety, the percentage of finding a specific organism

3: What characteristics to look for (water temperature, ph, salinity) when searching for plankton.

I'm assuming they did the same thing. Took a sampling of the galaxy (by examining solar systems and planets) and applied the same method to come up with a percentage.

That isn't fully accurate but it is the best we can do with current technology.

The concept that we are the only life in the universe, even with such low odds, is dumb. The number favor more life, if based on evolution, and if we were to look at it from a Divine intervention perspective, the numbers would be far greater.

I think it amusing to assume that life must be like us, and it must communicate in the same manner as we do.

There is a .01% chance that my brother could exist somewhere else in this world. I've narrowed down his four "required" attributes (Complaining, yelling, eating, and sleeping), and the data isn't looking so good.