“Somewhere in This Great, Big Universe There Must Exist Other Life.”  Is This Sentiment Valid?

With all of the Navy footage revealing UAP activity, and my recent discovery of Bob Lazaar (from a Joe Rogan interview), I have once again started contemplating the reality of extraterrestrial life in the universe. But I just wanted to approach the subject from the perspective of probability. Namely, what are the odds of life having arisen on just Earth? And then, what would be the odds of that Life arising on some other world and then that life form visiting our planet?

In order to address this question there are a couple assumptions we have to make before going forward. Firstly, we have to assume that God did not put people on the Earth, and, secondly, we must subscribe to the idea that people are organic robots that are produced by Darwinian evolution which has acted upon some replicator molecule (eg., RNA) that was birthed in the “organic soup” which evolved on this planet. Fair enough?

If you don’t accept the above premises, then you’ll find my point made below impossible to accept.

I say, “life” is a misnomer. It just means something that survives to reproduce. Life is no miracle, but an extraordinary complexity that has arisen from molecules. So, in short, we are organic machines. (And we will be shown this soon as AI replaces all our functionality in the next 10 years 😂). So, what is the probability that a replicating molecule formed accidentally on this planet? I say it was probably as low as 1 to the number of all planets orbiting all the stars in all the galaxies in our universe. That’s right. I’m guessing that it was extremely improbable. So what does that mean? It means, if the odds of the birth of the replicator molecules is that small a probability, that would imply that, on average, life would arise just once in our universe. For example, if you play a lottery, and the odds are 1 in 300 million, that means that, on average, the pot will be won when it has grown to about 300 million (dollars / euros / pesos, etc.) With me so far?

In short, despite all the trillions of stars and zillions of planets that may exist in our universe–that often cause people to claim there “must be life in the universe”–I’m saying that the chances of molecules coming together in a “primitive chemical soup” to produce a molecule that self-replicates with fidelity, is astronomically low. The sentiment that there are “a billion, trillion planets out in the universe that could be habitable to life and therefore extraterrestrial life must exist“, is a nonsense argument. It’s nonsense, because we don’t know the odds of life arising here in the first place–it doesn’t matter how many potentially habitable planets are out there.

The argument that “life evolved here, therefore it’s very likely to have happened somewhere else”, simply isn’t valid.

Can you imagine how many trillions upon septillions of times amino acids and sugar phosphate chains had to ‘bump’ into each other in just the right way to produce a molecule that could copy itself? Geologists suspect that life didn’t arise on Earth until a billion years had passed–that is, according to the fossil record. Not until that replicator was “born” could Darwinian selection start working on that replicator to craft something as complex as human beings.

I am guessing that the birth of the replicator molecule was most likely a “miracle” of high improbability. To assume otherwise, is perhaps to assume that there is something inherent in the molecules themselves that should lead to life. For example, with respect to carbon, its four valence electrons and its ability to form four covalent bonds are crucial to its role as a central element in organic chemistry. Does this mean that nucleotides and amino acids are somehow “pre-destined” to occur due to carbon’s structure? I don’t believe this is a valid argument either.

So has life happened anywhere else than on Earth?

Sadly, I would have to say, I don’t believe so. 

What is more likely, absurd as it sounds, is that some intelligent life has evolved on this planet — perhaps under the sea?—and it has managed to hide itself from us for many thousands of years.  Again, sound absurd? Yes. But that idea is likely many thousands of times more probable than the idea of ET being born hundreds of light years away on some planet and coming to visit us here on the Earth.