Cosmologist: A Trillion Trillion Planets, Zero Alien Evidence

What's the most credible evidence for extraterrestrial life? So I've been going off on this a lot lately, including conversations with people like Avi Loeb and Michael Shermer, you know, kind of on opposite sides of the fence, and Beatrice Villareal. And, you know, there really isn't evidence right now. I mean, there's data that we collect that is suggestive, but it's by no means, you know, probative. And so there was a survey done in Nature Astronomy by Vickers and all, and I just learned about this thanks to having a conversation with a Christian apologist, effectively, Hugh Ross, who brought the survey to my attention. It's done in Nature Astronomy. It's not like, you know, Discovery Institute did the survey. And in it, they described that, you know, something like 88% of astronomers or astrobiologists survey believe that there is the existence of extraterrestrial life. And I said, that shouldn't dignify that question with an answer. She said, I don't believe, you know, is there evidence for it? So there is, in fact, maybe slight evidence against life in the universe being, you know, abundant. And the large numbers hypothesis is a hell of a drug. You know, people think, oh, there's 10 to the 24th planets. Let's just say Adam Frank, you know, Professor Adam Frank, who I've had on, is right. And yeah, they've been on multiple, you know, planets or on multiple stars and multiple galaxies and multiple clusters of galaxies going back multiple billions of years. I agree with all those numbers. You know, there could be a factor of 10 either way, but it's still, you know, a trillion trillion, a border of trillion trillion bodies in the observable universe over the history of the universe, which is important because if life existed, you know, 8 billion years ago, good luck finding it, right? That's gone now. Because the average stellar system is not going to live anywhere near that time, especially going back in time when population three that we heard about earlier was dominant and those stars lasted 50 million years. So good luck trying to find, you know, an exoplanet with life on it in another galaxy, you know, 13 billion years ago. So there are people that say the rapid emergence of life on earth is evidence, but that's not really evidence. It's evidence of how it instantiated itself on earth itself as one example. Organic chemistry, if I had organic chemistry throughout the universe, you know, we find all sorts of elements and we find all sorts of combinations and carbon is a very abundant element in the universe. In our galaxy and so on. So to say that it's there, it's almost, you know, as Hugh Ross tries to use it as an example of fine tuning that actually there could be life everywhere in the universe but we only find life on earth, therefore God wanted it to be so. So I think you get into this delicate balance if you're saying that life is so abundant. Now, I don't believe that's a valid argument either. I use my canonical example of being in Antarctica twice in my life at the South Pole, you know, which is one seventh of the earth's continents, right? But it doesn't have one seventh of the earth's mass or one seventh of the earth's population. It has almost zero population. Right now in the middle of winter, it has almost zero, about maybe 200 people on the entire continent and the other 8.3 billion are elsewhere, right? Including people that are living under the ocean and there's a couple of people living in space, right? So there's, you know, not more than one or two orders of magnitude more people living in Antarctica than living on the space station. But that's so, and there's an awful lot of space in the universe. Do we expect to find life on other, you know, floating around in space and just random locations? So the amount of space in the universe is a fallacious argument. It's an example of the large numbers hypothesis. So I don't believe that. And I don't think you should say belief. You know, I say, do we have evidence? And the last thing which I've used and I have yet to hear a cogent, you know, reply or falsification of my hypothesis is that earth and Mars shared a common history when Mars had liquid water running on it and we were exchanging meteorites like these meteorites that you'll get if you go to briankeating.com slash edu and you have a .edu email address or if you go to briankeating.com slash yt and you don't have one, I do give them away. You have to live in the US because the post office service won't mail these things outside of the US at least not for like 50 bucks. And I'm sorry, I cannot afford that. But I will send them to you no matter what if you have a us.edu email address. So the fact that the earth, Mars, moon, all these celestial bodies, but in particular Mars which have running water, is in the habitable zone and has, you know, all sorts of the requirements that's believed to be supportive of life including carbon dioxide, you know, in its atmosphere. So the fact that we don't see life on Mars or any evidence of life on Mars, that's not proof. Again, we can't look everywhere. We've only scratched less than the barest, you know, a few centimeters of its surface throughout a couple of landing spots. And so that's not proof but there's certainly not mega cities there and dolphins swimming around with iPhones. So the fact that we could have had life and that we could have been seeded by the cosmos using panspermic logic, the fact that Mars wasn't seeded and that we are exchanged, like we're like a stock room that's sending life to these other planets. I mean, there are going to be fossils found on Mars someday probably. It's not out of the realm of possibility, not from fossilized life that used to live on Mars but from fossils that lived on earth that got blasted in meteorite impacts to Mars and to the moon. Now, maybe they'll be not, you know, we won't find them but it's not physically impossible. Therefore it has some actual probability. And certainly I wouldn't say there's no possibility of life throughout the universe. I would just say that the evidence for intelligent life or, you know, sophisticated advanced life is very, very scant if not zero. And so multiplying zero by 10 to the 24th still gives you zero. And that's the large numbers gamblers hypothesis fallacy. So I've seen evidence that, you know, we're gonna hear about things that have life like signatures, biosignatures. We've heard that many, many times. I'm not talking about disclosure. I'm talking about like phosphine on Venus and other extremophiles. The existence of life on earth, you know, for now remains our only documented evidence for life in the universe. It doesn't mean there couldn't be life elsewhere in the universe. We do seed, as I said, other planets. We have, you know, biological organisms that can survive the harshness of space. And as you go up the sophistication ladder to, you know, bipedal human-like objects, I think that that's, you know, gets even less plausible. But again, I will never say impossible after all. The name of the podcast is Into the Impossible.