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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

I would take that bet. The observable universe is estimated to have 10^21 stars and the actual universe is infinite.

The size of the actual universe is irrelevant for this discussion since anything outside the observable universe does not have any casual connection to us.

But of course you are right about the absolutely staggering number of stars in the observable universe.

>The size of the actual universe is irrelevant for this discussion since anything outside the observable universe does not have any casual connection to us.

I don't see how causality plays into the question at hand. The parent post didn't bet that we could interact with alien life, but if it exists at all. If it can be demonstrated that the actual universe is infinite, it will follow that alien live exist, independent of if we can interact with it.

This is logically incorrect. The universe may well be infinite, but that doesn’t imply it must harbour life

I believe this would be correct if there were no examples of life already extant - but the fact that we exist shows that the probability of life and civilization arising is strictly greater than 0. Given an infinite universe with a flat probability distribution (i.e. there's nothing particularly special about our little corner), any >0 probability will occur an infinite number of times.

I highly doubt the actual universe is really infinite, however. Incomprehensibly big, yes.

Not enough proof to win the bet, so right now you're losing.

Right now, nobody has proof. While aliens can be discovered at a future date, you can never prove that they don’t exist. It is a very safe bet because they can not prove a negative.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "actual universe" but there's no proof that space is infinite. Unfathomably vast yes, but still finite.

what's the proof it's finite?

Our senses are finite; we cannot directly know infinity through them. Because of that, I think the burden of proof is on the claim that it is infinite.

Isn't space itself continuously expanding?

Expansion of space doesn’t preclude the universe being infinite.

by actual universe, I meant total universe ( opposed to the observable universe). All of the evidence we have collected so far suggests that the universe is flat and infinite. While some finite universes could be proven, so far we have not.

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