Stampie said:
So if you say there's a 1 in a billion chance of life outside our solar system in the Milky Way then there's an estimated 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 "live" civilizations out there.
In the absence of some mechanism that drives "necessity", the odds are wildly, vanishingly less than one in a billion.
In fact, again, baring "necessity", if all of the matter in the visible universe were to be comprised of organic compounds and everything were to be mixing as fast as theoretically possible based on Planck minimums of distance (ten to the minus 35 meters) and Planck minimums of time (10 to the minus 43 seconds) to produce the greatest probabilistic resource imaginable, we'd still have essentially zero chance of life ever forming even for a moment anywhere in the visible universe.
I always hear "you just can't comprehend how vast and ancient the universe is" which is completely true but I don't have to, I just need to mathematically model how many rolls of the dice the universe has had (probabilistic resource) and what percent of dice rolls produce life (consensus estimate currently stands at something like one in ten to the power of 534).
I'm all for searching for the elusive source of "necessity" but until discovered, subscribing to neo-Darwinism is a form of religion not science...BTW, I call it neo-Darwinism as Darwin himself wrote in The Origin of Species that he had no idea how life originated and he acknowledged that the Cambrian Explosion was a conspicuous violation of what his theory predicts.
One alternative to "necessity" is the multiverse as that gives an infinite probabilistic resource but that's just another blind faith religious notion like the "necessity" concept that nobody has discovered despite dozens (hundreds?) of top scholars dedicating their careers to it for well over a century.
I fully respect everyone's right to believe what they want but all I've seen thrown at what many organic chemists, micro biologists, and statisticians (who are either retired or have tenure) is mockery and ridicule.
Blast away...