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Originally Posted by Dunyain
Even starting with similar conditions, I think the vast majority of the time life goes extinct long before something like humans evolve, probably long before multicellular life evolves. There may be other life out there somewhere, but that is just because the universe is such a large place, not because it is statistically likely that life would evolve or follow a particular path. It is in fact possible the chance of life happening and evolving in the direction of sentient life is so statistically small we may be alone as far as sentient life goes.
You're pointing at the 'great filter' version of the answer to the Fermi Paradox, which is not really a paradox in the literal or metaphorical sense, because the answer to it is very simply that space is very big and time is very long and there likely have been vast vast numbers of alien civilisations but they exist so far away and in such a relatively small slice of time as to render them effectively impossible to find evidence of let alone communicate with. We have no alternative history generators with regards to the development of life and even though there's such a thing as a goldilocks zone, and a habitable zone as it applies both within a single solar system as well as galaxy-wide, it could turn out that life is actually a lot more common and likely than we previously thought, and that given enough time, most sources of life end up in complex organisms such as ourselves. There's even some current belief that Venus, despite its horrendous conditions, could harbour life, or have harboured life before now but still in its present state.
Quote:
Originally Posted by d2_e4
I think I actually agree with Chillrob. Basically, if we accept the premise that evolution is the result of a bunch of coin flips where the coin was weighted heads 51% of the time, it's an inescapable conclusion, mathematically.
Replace "heads" with whatever trait evolution selected for, and you reach the same results with the same or marginally different inputs. No "butterfly effect" here, it would actually run contrary to the principle of the whole thing.
What I think is the main issue here is a style of belief that really is kinda religious in nature akin to 'destination'. History is not a matter of destination. It's absolutely not the case that the way we are, and all the stops we've had along the way, are guaranteed, or even likely. If any huge number of seemingly small events had gone even slightly different ways, the world could and would be very, very different. There is no 'arc of history' in this sense. There may be truth to the idea that history rhymes but does not repeat, and perhaps even some validity to the idea of 'cycles' as a number of historian-philosophers going back as far as (AFAIK) giambattista vico talk about, but those cycles are not set in stone and are subject to change.