Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nom" data-source="post: 7766400" data-attributes="member: 56980">I'm not sure this is a good analogy.  On the evidence we have, the ocean is inherently life-bearing.Imagine instead that you found a small rock in the ocean, and investigating it you discover that it is actually hollow and there is a colony of some small creature living inside.  You can discern no mechanism by which the creatures got there, and the raw ocean environment is highly hostile to them.  Surveying the nearby ocean, you discover no further colonies, nor for that matter rocks that might be potential sites for such colonies.  Expanding your search to the limits of how far you can go, you find a few candidate rocks, but no evidence of colonies.  But there's a lot, lot more ocean out there.How long would you have to search to find a similar occupied rock?  (I avoid the term "colonised" because that implies that the creatures were transported from an external place).To useful answer that question, you need a workable hypothesis for how the creatures got there.  All the evidence suggests that there is no external biological interaction for a very long time, if ever.  If you think they came from some sort of proto-lifeform that was transported to the rock, then perhaps its likely that the same happened elsewhere.  If you think it was spontaneously generated, then you need a model for how this might have happened and how rare those circumstances are.  If you think a superior intelligence was involved, then you need some sort of model of that superior intelligence's actions and purposes.PS: you're doing all this as one of the creatures in the colony</blockquote>

Verification