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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.

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Is that a reasonable assumption to make? I don't think we have any evidence of other places we look being "largely the same" with respect to life conduciveness. It took billions of years for our own planet to achieve multicellular life, which is a significant fraction of our best estimate of the lifetime of the entire universe up to this point.

But the universe is big and there are billions of billions of other planets which could very well have similar conditions, that also exist for billions of years

We can't really see at that scale yet. But at the scale we can see, our star system seems to be rather mundane.

I suppose it's easier to believe you're a special snowflake than it is to believe you're just average.

Even though you are unique snowflake there are and will be millions like you.

Maybe we are not special. But we can accidentally be one of the first.

The question isn't about what's easier to believe, it's about what the evidence supports. The probability for life (or multicellular life or intelligent life or technological life) to evolve on any given planet is strictly between 0 and 1. You can believe what you want, but the facts don't support any stronger statement than that.

Our planet is only 4 billion years old; for the first billion years or so, it was sizzling-hot and under constant bombardment.

Given the Copernican principle, yes. I thought we gave up claiming our position as the centre of the universe long ago?

Probably the Universe is full of things even more amazing than life as we know it.

I think they might be referring to the fact the human species seems to think it's exceptional and has a unique place in the universe.

Every star system and planet is rare -- unique, even -- if we're specific enough about the details. The hard part is knowing what details are important when we only have a sample size of 1.

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