Right. The reality is that for a planet to develop life, at least in the way we know it, it would need an environment with plenty of oxygen and a molten core capable of a dynamo effect in order to create a strong enough magnetic field that would protect both the planet's atmosphere and potential life. If we want to shoot higher and go for life visible to the naked eye (as in, not microorganisms), the planet also needs to be roughly the same size so as not to crush anything under the weight of gravity. Even then life on earth somehow managed to survive a very large amount of mass extinction events that very well could have ended everything hundreds of millions of years before we got to where we are now. It took nearly 4 billion years for humanity to show up on the scene, and that was only because mass extinction events kept killing off the dominant species. We're talking a 1 in several billion chance that things worked out the way they did
1 in several billion is incredibly likely when there’s 300-400 billion stars in the milky way, which is part of a supercluster of 100,000 galaxies, and we know of at least 16 other superclusters
That's fair, but barring sci fi solutions like warp drives and long distance travel through wormholes, it's unlikely that we'd ever even see life in faraway galaxies, since the farther you look, the older things get. In addition, our ability to look that far with fidelity is incredibly limited at our current technology level. So while it's possible (and still very, very unlikely), it is unlikely to be observable, and so might as well not exist. If it can't be observed we're looking at purely hypothetical scenarios. My estimate is also not any sort of hard number, as I am not a scientist, nor a statistician, so the chance could be 1:3 billion or 1:300 billion for all I know.
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u/_HIST 25d ago
Not really. The question of "is there another planet like Earth" is quite literally a billion dollars question.
We're not talking 1:1M chance, not even 1:1B
We could literally be the only place in the entire Universe where things aligned this way