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Comment by 0xfeba | Hacker News Reader

Not quite. No one's publishing papers to that effect. What casual science fans and some popular scientists do posit is that the universe is so big, our solar system so average (as far as we know), so it's highly likely that life exists or has existed elsewhere.

The alternative is the anthropocentric view that the entire universe was created merely for our viewing pleasure on Earth.

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Agreed with cmrdporcupine. The anthropocentric view is actually the idea that because life exists for us, it therefore isn't that special and is likely to have arisen somewhere else - we are anthropocentrically biased to think that life is more likely than it actually is because we ourselves experience it.

That's not really what anthropocentric means. Anthropocentric is that the human species, not just life, is special.

What you are talking about is "anthroexclusive", or something like that.

See my response to whom you agree with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12359111

Correct. The term I meant to use was anthropic bias.

Or that the universe is so diverse and complex that assuming that this same rather random event occurs in the exact same way multiple times in many places is also quite arrogant.

No one is claiming that a random event (?) occurs the exact same way. They just use statistics, based on some known factors and yes, a lot of guesses.

We know how stars form, how galaxies form, how solar systems form. We know the general consistency of the galaxies around us, and some systems in our same galaxy. It's not a big leap to assume that some percentage of them will be hospitable (for a time) for life, at least life as we know it.

I'd say the arrogant views are that the whole universe was created for us, or that life must be thoroughly plentiful throughout the universe. The least arrogant view is that it's somewhere in-between, but more importantly, to always adapt to the latest evidence.

Pulling probabilities out of your behind is not statistics. Currently we have an anecdote and you want to extrapolate from that. That's shoddy science.

Even further, we know very little about abiogenesis. And even if we did that would only explain the development of single cell prokaryotes. Eukaryotic cells are of immense complexity, we haven't found anything "between" prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and I haven't heard many good working theories for the explosion of them, and then beyond that multicellular organisms.

So to try to extrapolate that to the "inevitability" of complex life in the universe is like saying that your name will be spelled out in ASCII in the repeating digits of Pi somewhere. Maybe? Can you prove it? No?

I'm not a philosopher of science, or statistician. But the assumption that somewhere there are things "like us" seems to be both arrogant and very teleological -- an implication that the universe proceeds towards an order very similar to us. (Popular science fiction is infested with this kind of telelogical narrative.)

And contrary to arrogantly thinking earth-life is special and unique my argument is that we are just one of a rather infinite variety of "things" in the universe. Life is amazing and complex -- but so are the clouds of Jupiter.

> But the assumption that somewhere there are things "like us" seems to be both arrogant and very teleological

Well, "like us", inasmuch as an entity that is self-regulating, and capable of response to external stimuli. The most basic assumptions for life.

So yes, at some level it is arrogant to assume there's anything else like us. Your view is very nihilistic. But, until we know of other sentient species, it is all about us. We are, as far as we know, very lonely, ex-nihilio orphans in the vast universe. It's only arrogance to nothingness to posit there might be more life in the universe. It is not arrogant to humanity.

So, yes, we are in many ways better than clouds of Jupiter. But of course it is us making that claim. So what? Allow humanity some slack. If we have offended some unknown creator with our supposed insolence, perhaps it should make itself more easily known.

But, again, no one is claiming this is real science. It's just a fun thought experiment.

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