David Kipping

That's not a scientific experiment anymore.

You've already decided, so what are you trying to learn?

What's the point of doing the experiment if you already know what the answer is?

There's no point.

I would say you don't have to believe that we are alone, but you have to admit it's a possibility of our ignorance of the universe so far.

You can have a belief about something in the absence of evidence, and Carl Sagan famously described that as the definition of faith.

If you believe something when there's no evidence, you have faith that there's life in the universe, but you can't demonstrate, you can't prove it mathematically, you can't show me evidence of that.

You can certainly make a very good argument, and I think you've kind of already made one, just the vastness of the universe is the default argument people often turn to, that surely there should be others out there.

It's hard to imagine.

There are an order of 10 to the 22 stars in our observable universe.

And so really the question comes down to what is the probability of one of those 10 to the 22 planets, let's say, Earth-like planets, if they all have Earth-like planets, going on to form life spontaneously.

That's the process of abiogenesis, the spontaneous emergence of life.

Also the word spontaneous is a funny word.

Okay, maybe we won't use spontaneous, but...

not being, let's say, seeded by some other civilization or something like this.

It naturally emerges.

Right, it could be a very gradual process over millions of years of growing complexity in chemical networks.

Yeah, I mean, certainly, I mean, it's kind of weird that complexity develops at all, right?

Because it seems like the opposite to our physical intuition, if you're training in physics, of entropy, that things should, you know, complexity is hard to spontaneously, or I shouldn't say spontaneously, but hard to emerge in general.

And so that's an interesting problem.