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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Survivorship bias, when your analysis only takes into account successes while ignoring failures.
Survivorship bias. But also just being wrong. Our orbit around the sun takes us much closer and further from the sun, a massive margin, it doesn’t affect temperature though because at the scale of the solar system it doesn’t make much of a difference.
Edit: fixed phrasing that made my statement seem much more extreme than it is.
The phenomenon is called the anthropic principle, an instance of survivorship bias, which in general refers to the universe as a whole not just the earth but also applies in that more specific case.
You basically have the gist of it already, that we observe a universe (and a planet) in which the conditions are right for us to exist, because if they weren’t we wouldn’t be there to observe it.
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.
I’m not sure it’s a logical fallacy, it’s a valid question. As we currently understand it, there are many constants that changed slightly would mean there would be no suns or no chemistry/life.
One of the main responses is around the anthropic principal. If it was different then there would be no-one around to notice.
The analogy I’ve herd is if there is some rain and a puddle forms. You might say the hole in the ground is perfectly shaped for the puddle/water. If the hole was slightly different dimensions than the puddle’s dimensions it wouldn’t fit. But that’s the wrong way to look at things, the puddle will take the shape of the whole in the ground. So it’s not some random chance the hole’s dimension perfectly match the puddles.
One form of the anthropic principle is around many worlds, as in there exist worlds with all the different constants. So we find ourselves in the world that has constants suitable for life.
The “fallacy of privileged exception” is at play here, folks. What’s that mean? It’s when some chump employs one exception to a rule as evidence that the rule itself is irrelevant or unworthy of adherence. As for the Chicken Supreme being real or not, using Earth’s life-sustaining elements as proof of divinity is ungrounded. What of the countless other planets where no life lurks? Similarly, proclaiming our existence as miraculous merely because Earth’s ambiance is just right is hogwash. We can only exist if those necessary elements coexist – simple as that.
Statements like this will often devolve into something like begging the question if you probe them.
Habitable world(s) proves God, their God makes habitable world(s), habitable worlds prove God, and so on…
Doenst this also go in the direction of the sleeping beauty problem? Basically we dont know what happend before we “woke up” so we ignore all the failure?
I believe what you’re looking for is the argument from incredulity. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity)
How rare something is or appears to be doesn’t tell you anything about whether it’s true or not. Therefore statements like X seems unlikely therefore it must be false are logical fallacies. A long the same lines you have other logical fallacies like it’s also irrelevant to whether something is true just because the majority of people believe it to be true, or that those that believe it to be true believe it vehemently.
A popular one doing the rounds lately off the back of the recent UAP hearing in the US congress is that if aliens could travel here then they wouldn’t be crashing due to the knowledge and skill required just to get here. The issue here is that to be able to accept that this claim is true you would need to demonstrate that these alien craft are incapable of crashing. Until then you cannot reasonably assert that it’s true. For example, no matter how minuscule the chance of a crash may be, you can explain any number of observed crashes simply by scaling the individual uptime or by running more in parallel which are both vectors that we would have no way to confirm and if we could confirm it the argument would be redundant anyway.
The issue stems from an incorrect construction/framing of the argument. For any proposition there isn’t the proposition and its antithesis. This is where the concept of the null hypothesis comes in. You don’t get to declare something as true or false unless you have strong evidence to suggest the affirmative or negative and so in the absence of that evidence you should rationally assume the null hypothesis, whatever that is in the terms of the argument.
That’s not really a fallacy. It’s just incomplete and somewhat outdated.
Here’s the base argument: It is possible for me to flip a coin 1,000 times and get heads each time. But, that outcome is so unlikely that “the coin isn’t fair” is a more likely explanation than just random chance.
If you lived 200 years ago and really were unaware of the sheer vastness of space, you likely would have considered Earth to be unique. And, if Earth is unique, then you start to believe that it’s far more likely that there’s something more going on than simple dumb luck.
However, the argument falls apart once astronomers demonstrate how we are a tiny part of a massive galaxy and that there are many many more galaxies out there. So, statistically, there have to be lots of planets where life has developed. And, then the premise of that argument falls apart– Earth isn’t unique. It just happens to be one of the 1/(2^1000) times that you really did get 1,000 heads in a row.
Also, it’s not clear that it really is 1/(2^1000). That may be the chance that you get life exactly like we have it. But, flip one of those coins the other way, and maybe we have 6 fingers instead of 5. Flip another, and maybe we can live in hotter or colder temperatures, etc….. We know from our own planet that life can survive in a lot of different environments.
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