Have you heard of the puddle analogy?
A small amount of water sits there, it this hole in the ground it finds itself in. It looks at this cavity, observes how perfectly it fits the contours of their liquid body. It’s perfect! Every nook and cranny seems to be formed to fit the puddle perfectly.
“This hole must have been made for me! It’s too much of a coincidence that, with all the ways a hole could form, this one formed perfectly to fit me!”
You’re doing that. You’re saying it’s a crazy coincidence that all the right things were in place here for life to exist that led to us being here… but if it wasn’t, then we just wouldn’t have developed as life-forms. Or if the environs were different, life would have developed to fit into that kind of solar system. I think you just like the idea, so you believe it, but I think it’s better to believe things we have evidence for.
Jesus fucking christ. You know how water works, right? It fits the form of the container it’s in. It’s an simplified analogy to explain what that other guy linked to. We (well, you) see a universe fit to our kind of life, but the reality is that we developed to fit the universe.
You remind me of this guy I saw the other day claiming that a whole bunch of rocks that are vaguely shaped like body parts might be fossilized body parts.
He just kept saying “I’m not saying it definitely is, but imagine if we don’t understand the world, and it’s maybe this way? Crazy right?!”
It’s such cowardly bullshit. If you want to believe a thing because it sounds nice to you, don’t half-ass it and throw qualifiers on it. You brought it up, and then when challenged the tiniest bit, backed down with a “I’m not saying that’s definitely true… but maybe…?”
What expectations? Actual scientist, using facts, don’t have expectations of alien life. We don’t know the probability of life existing anywhere but here because we have nothing to compare it to. We have the one universe with the one data set available to us. Until we discover alien life, we should have no expectation for it. Do I think it’s likely there is life elsewhere? Yes. Does that mean I expect it? No. We don’t have enough information about the cosmos to even start to calculate whether it should happen.
I had a roommate once who believed that the stuff from the Alvin the Maker book series was real. The magic and shit. I asked if he had anything that led him to believe that or if he just really liked the books and wanted it to be. OF course he didn’t have any evidence or real reason for it. He just wanted it to be so, so he decided that he was going to believe that thing.
You’re doing that. Stop it. Be a grown-up here and stop believing in make-believe and believe things only when we have sufficient (or in your case, I’ll take any) evidence.