re: #232 Naso Tang

I’m guessing you didn’t see the video, but if you want a concise answer to the above, it follows:

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That’s not what the original poster was saying though. Catholics are not generally considered part of the “evangelical” movement. That’s mostly the domain of Protestants.

@Right Brain
We’ve made no assumptions with the Drake equation, which is a bad equation to use because you must put in your own numbers of variables and no one can agree on those numbers.

Indeed, you are the one assuming things about it. We don’t assume that life just springs up everywhere. We don’t assume that such life would automatically discover the benefits of radio communication. We don’t assume that were they to discover such communication methods, they would be curious enough to look for life on other planets. We don’t assume that the paltry few decades that we have been searching for life outside our own planet would yield results in a universe billions upon billions of years old and untold millions of lightyears in size.

Do you know how little of the sky we can actually watch? It’s a funny little thing that happens when you’re a sphere and you’re surrounded by infinite space. You can view less than .00000000000000000001% of it. We could quite easily just not be watching or listening at the right place at the right time.

Yet you assume that not finding the life on other planets means none exists. Scientists are open to the idea not because of assumptions, but because of statistics. No one who believes in God does so because of the probability of it. Yet ask a scientist why he thinks there must be extraterrestrial life and he will cite the vast size of the universe and the sheer number of suns similar to ours with orbiting planets that on at least a small number of these, must exist conditions similar to earth, and that on a small number of those dopplegangers, must exist some form of life. Just statisically.

You wouldn’t expect in a universe with billions of stars like ours, with a billion planets like ours, that we were the only life out there. It’s highly improbably. Especially when we apply the knowledge of life on our planet to that statistic. Life arose on this planet pretty quickly after it cooled down, and it has found ways to survive multiple catastrophes. Even when 95% of species are wiped out, “Life finds a way”.