I'm tired of hearing these types of extremely confident lay-assertions about life beyond earth. It's true that the number of planets is incomprehensibly large, but it could also be true that the probability of a particular planet developing life is incomprehensibly small. In physics and chemistry, there are some odds that remain so extremely small even when you roll the dice many many times. Stop using "incomprehensibility" as an argument since it can go both ways.
There’s 250 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Our local supercluster has 100,000 galaxies in it. Previous estimates were that there are 100-200 Billion galaxies in the observable universe and this article suggests the figure is 10x as much as that.
The Kepler telescope has been discovering planets around nearby stars for a while now, and the impression we get are that at least half of the stars seem to have planets around them.
With 250 Billion stars in our galaxy and 200 Billion galaxies or more just in the observable universe (also cosmologists believe the actual universe is larger than the observable universe by an unknown amount), that leaves us with somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 Billion trillion (that is, 25 Billion * 1 trillion) planets in the observable universe. 100 Billion + worlds just in our galaxy.
We also believe that the laws of physics are the same across the universe and that water and other basic elements are abundant throughout the universe.
So to me it seems like even with extremely remote probabilities of life existing, to me it seems most likely that there would be lots of planets where life started.
Nice intuition. Too bad intuition has nothing to do with quantifiable numbers. "Extremely remote probability" is a human idea that you have in your head. It has nothing remotely scientific in it.
There's an extremely remote probability that the atoms in your body might teleport to the Great Wall of China. How much are you willing to bet that it happens?
