MAY THE UNIVERSE CONSPIRE IN YOUR FAVOR UPDATE

And what are the odds that these extraterrestrial lives could be complex, differentiated and intelligent? Here, Kipping's inquiry is less assured, finding just 3:2 odds in favor of intelligent life. Kipping's conclusion is that if planets with similar conditions and evolutionary time lines to Earth are common, then the analysis suggests that life should have little problem spontaneously emerging on other planets. Kipping emphasizes that the ratio is at least 9:1 or higher, depending on the true value of how often intelligence develops. The analysis is based on evidence that life emerged within 300 million years of the formation of the Earth's oceans as found in carbon-13-depleted zircon deposits, a very fast start in the context of Earth's lifetime. 'But a key result here is that when one compares the rare-life versus common-life scenarios, the common-life scenario is always at least nine times more likely than the rare one.' 'In Bayesian inference, prior probability distributions always need to be selected,' Kipping said. 'It encourages the repeated testing of new evidence against your position, in essence a positive feedback loop of refining your estimates of likelihood of an event.'ДЇrom these four hypotheses, Kipping used Bayesian mathematical formulas to weigh the models against one another. 'The technique is akin to betting odds,' Kipping said.

MAY THE UNIVERSE CONSPIRE IN YOUR FAVOR UPDATE

This method of Bayesian statistical inference - used to update the probability for a hypothesis as evidence or information becomes available - states prior beliefs about the system being modeled, which are then combined with data to cast probabilities of outcomes. He framed the problem in terms of four possible answers: Life is common and often develops intelligence, life is rare but often develops intelligence, life is common and rarely develops intelligence and, finally, life is rare and rarely develops intelligence. He asked how often we would expect life and intelligence to re-emerge if Earth's history were to repeat, re-running the clock over and over again. To conduct his analysis, Kipping used the chronology of the earliest evidence for life and the evolution of humanity. 'But in this study it's possible to actually quantify what the facts tell us.' 'The rapid emergence of life and the late evolution of humanity, in the context of the timeline of evolution, are certainly suggestive,' Kipping said. In a new paper published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences today, David Kipping, an assistant professor in Columbia's Department of Astronomy, shows how an analysis using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference could shed light on how complex extraterrestrial life might evolve in alien worlds. We also know that the first multicellular organism, which eventually produced today's technological civilization, took far longer to evolve, approximately 4 billion years.Д«ut despite knowing when life first appeared on Earth, scientists still do not understand how life occurred, which has important implications for the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe. We know from the geological record that life started relatively quickly, as soon as our planet's environment was stable enough to support it.

May the universe conspire in your favor