Comments by "Wiczus" (@wiczus6102) on "Why we might be alone in the Universe" video.

  1. I don't think people understand the point of statistics. Probability is needed because we have incomplete datasets, so how exactly can someone "not know the probability"? The estimates that a person is making are the probability (no informations 50/50 all information 100/0). So the argumentation that we cannot asses the probability makes little sense.
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  2. Extremophiles do not necessarily possess complex mechanisms. An example is the heat resistant Taq polymerase, just a silghtly longer verision of the normal polymerase. There is no need of evading the temperature if the proteins can just handle it.
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  3. ​ @CoolWorldsLab  As you stated we only have 1 example, so I am not sure why should we use likelihood function for this. If we treat it as a yes/no event, then you'd have to substantiate arguments to reduce/increase the probability. And I'd go ahead with the average lenghts of RNA polymers under a given concentration of nucleic acids, have a particular chance of creating a replicating mechanism - we know that such mechanism can exist with around 70 nucleotides (some reported 14). So if we have a concentration that is high enough for 70x long polymers to get created regurarely, it only becomes a matter of time and rate before such mechanism gets created right? I don't want to assume that every life must use the 4 nucleic acids that we do on earth, but if that'd be the case it's around 4*10^-8 every time such polymer is formed. After milions of years, this is quite certain (in fact it could be that it happens more often than once, but the RNA doesn't survive the competition). I don't want to get into the math of this, since I'd need to research the rate at which they are formed and I probably make a thousand errors anyway, but it doesn't seem as if there were enough arguments to reduce the chance of abiogenesis per planet into 10^-1000.
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