When people say that e.g. it’s such a miracle that life on Earth exists because the slightest change in its distance from the Sun or gravity or the lack of water would make it impossible for us to be around – forgetting that our existence presupposes all this. Or an argument for God that it cannot be accidental that we have all the preconditions on Earth to sustain ourselvea and that the way nature and our body works is a miracle – but it’s precisely why it can work and there are many planets where life couldn’t form for the lack of these components.
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I don’t know exactly what you would call it other than ignorance, but I just think we don’t really don’t know enough about the rest of the universe to know that. We know there is life on earth (obviously), we understand why (terrestrial) life couldn’t exist on other planets in our solar system, and we don’t hear radio waves coming from other planets, so we are left to assume that we are possibly alone in the universe. The Earth is undoubtedly special in its capacity to support life, the question is, is it unique.
The thing is that there are two hundred billion galaxies, and our galaxy alone has one hundred billion stars, each of those stars could have dozens of planets and moons. Some of those stars may have rocky planets inside the “goldilocks” zone where liquid water can exist, and has enough mass to maintain an atmosphere. Having an active core, which provides a magnetosphere that protects life from radiation and solar winds is pretty important too.
Another factor is that our star, Sol, was born in the first 3% of all the stars that will ever exist between the time of the Big Bang and the heat death of the universe. So, more than likely we are near the beginning of the timeline of the universe, and eventually new stars will be born, new planets will form, and some of them may eventually be able to support life. Not that you and I will care, we will be long gone by then.
Finally, we only know what the requirements for life on earth are. On other planets, life may have evolved to suit the unique environment and be fundamentally different from life here on earth. It’s possible that there is life on other planets that we wouldn’t even immediately recognize as being alive. The lack of radio waves doesn’t necessarily mean much either. Maybe life on other planets haven’t discovered radio (we only discovered it relatively recently), maybe they don’t need radio to communicate, maybe they are too far away to detect, and maybe they know something we don’t and are being quiet on purpose.
So, I am not saying that the Earth is not special, that life is not a miracle, or that God doesn’t exist, but we can’t use an absense of evidence as evidence of absence. We are looking at the universe through a keyhole, and there is so much more we just don’t understand just yet. We have only known that other stars in our galaxy have planets since the 1990’s, there is still so much for us to learn.
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