Bayesian Reasoning Dismisses Existence of Alien Life
The question of whether there is extraterrestrial life out in the 100s of billions of galaxies is a question that has been discussed for centuries. With the discovery of water on life, many are convinced that further exploration will reveal primitive life forms in the ice on the poles. Interestingly life on a planet so close to us might suggest that there are billions of other life forms across the universe – or does it… A recent paper publish by David Spiegel (Princeton) and Edwin Turner (Tokyo), suggest that Bayesian reasoning shows that just because we evolved on Earth doesn’t mean the same occurance would necessarily happen anywhere else. They deduced that we are a “cosmic aberration where life took shape unusually fast”. Life cropping up on other planets that are Earth like has only has smalls supporting evidence – the idea of life in other solar systems is largely based on the assumption that it’ll happen under the same conditions that happened on Earth. This bayes theorem application is similar to the one we studied in class and applied in our HW. We can draw parallels to the diagnosis of a disease application where the number of incorrectly diagnosed patients is extremely high because we do not consider the influence of a relatively small incorrect diagnosis applied to a huge sample size. The universe has 100s of billions of galaxies which need to be considered in the idea of extra terrestrial life.