This is obviously false in my opinion. We know when life started and when the earth started and it's pretty clear that earth started first.

I feel like too many people are "sci-fi brained" and overestimate the probability of clearly unlikely (impossible?) outcomes

like aliens existing for example. It's pretty clear that all life shares a common ancestor and that life isn't inherently special other than the fact that we are life and like to think there's some significance to life, when it's overwhelmingly likely that life is unique to earth for the same reason no two snowflakes are identical.

Just for some quick mathematical justification for this view (that I've believed is intuitively obvious for years now)

Suppose we could encode all the information about a planet in a 1024 dimensional embedding and suppose there are 10^30 planets.

The probability of a planet having a cosine similarity of at least 0.5 corresponds to being 16 standard deviations above the mean (mean: 0, std dev: 1/√ 1024 = 1/32 = 0.03125). Is on the order of 10^-60, so that's why I can confidently say alien life is essentially impossible

1. Nothing inherently special about us (believing so would be due to self centered bias - think when ppl thought earth was center of the universe due to this bias)

2. there's too many variables to be like us (it doesn't matter if there's 10^30 planets, they're all sufficiently different that the same random thing - life - will not happen twice)

What would have to happen for this to resolve to "No"?

How would this question resolve if base pairs appeared in the universe earlier than the formation of Earth but none of them seeded life on Earth (Earth independently created its own)?

@HedShock i think i would resolve it yes

@ashly_webb Assuming that the Universe is infinite (which is consistent with the current models), life is bound to have appeared somewhere before Earth. Will this still count?

@OlegEterevsky i would only resolve this yes if we prove that the universe is infinite

would you prefer i limit this to observable universe instead?

@ashly_webb It's up to you. I'm interested both in whether there's extraterrestrial life anywhere in the observable universe and in whether life on Earth appeared via panspermia, but to me those are two different questions.

@OlegEterevsky i intended for this to be a panspermia question too, but i don’t really care about whether it’s on earth or not

@ashly_webb That's a strange way to make this market. It makes perfect sense to ask this question about Earth life, and I would have bet on it if it was made this way, but why would you even want to ask that about extraterrestrial life... How would we know the answer... When would we know the answer... What is "similar building block"... We don't even have a clear-cut border for defining life here on Earth, and it's extremely non-obvious what would count as an equivalent of a base pair when we are talking about life with possibly really different chemistry. So yeah, quite strange to me