Premise: The collision of Theia, approximately 4.4 billion years ago, resulted in the transfer of just the right amount of radioactive elements (Uranium & Thorium, mostly) to provide for the perfectly balanced Carbon cycle we enjoy today.
Theia’s impact produced, not only the Moon (which is instrumental to Earth’s stability among other things) and not only gave Earth a much larger Iron/Nickel core (resulting in an oversized and critically necessary magnetosphere), but also transferred a Goldilocks amount of Uranium and Thorium to the Earth’s core to allow the Carbon cycle to exist.
Plate tectonics and vulcanism allow for sequestered Carbon (the sediment of billions of years of photosynthetic death and deposition) to be recycled into the atmosphere providing the perfect amount of CO2, turning Earth into the greenhouse paradise we enjoy today.
Without just the right amount of radioactivity, Earth’s core would either cool, ending the Carbon cycle (in addition to collapsing the magnetosphere) or boil the surface causing far too much vulcanism for life to exist on the planet.
This is just one more reason to accept that Earth is unique in the Universe and that Fermi’s Paradox is not a paradox at all.
We are probabilistically alone. 2^70 alone.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
If there IS intelligent life on other planets out there, I doubt they’d want anything to do with us;-)
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Alone … hmmm, well, no lightspeed take out then, nothing to do but listen to my Jim White. Duke
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Of course there’s a rather big assumption behind your Goldilocks assessment, something to do with materialism and cause-and-effect. Now suppose that everything has both outer (material) and inner (consciousness) aspects. Is it so surprising that consciousness would choose to create an interesting Goldilocks iuniverse rather than a barren and boring nothingness?
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So you’re saying the Universe is conscious…? Now that’s a thought…
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Seems likely to me. If not, at precisely what point and how did consciousness appear?
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There’s no such thing as consciousness. It’s a delusion we’ve convinced ourselves exists due to our ability to self-analyze. Or so I propose… See today’s post.
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Interesting theory!
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Probably depends on what you mean by alone.
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As to human ancestry See this site and learn that you are related to Charlemagne if you have any European ancestry at all. See: https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/24/business-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford
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Difficult enough to find intelligent life on this planet, dealing with what is known, spending time that could be well spent farting around, fuck the cosmos probabilities. The cosmic radio is on, superseding the Star Trek nonsense. There’s inexplainable shit enough on our own planet, why bother guessing about who or where but how. And if it was us, who were we before we became who we are, an$ how did we roll so far downhill?
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Fun with numbers. See https://www.freemars.org/jeff/2exp100/powers.htm
Can you guess the number of parents every person living together has back just 100 generations if we use 30 years per generation that would be just 3,000 years ago or 2 to the 100 power. Well it is more people then have ever lived in the entire history of the world. Thus we learn that everyone is related to everyone else on the planet and one need not go back nearly that far.
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Supposing there is “intelligent” (depends how you define I guess) life out there, why do we assume we’d ever be able to communicate with them? We can barely communicate with our closest mammalian relatives, apes, as it is. We all share the same planet with the same history, but we can’t talk about it. We can’t even talk about our favorite colors. So why would we be able to exchange ideas with extraterrestrials? Who knows if we could even recognize what they’d look like?
I don’t care either way if there’s life out there, but if there is, I hope they leave us alone. We have too many unsolved problems here to have to add them on top of it all. I’m too tired for them.
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Fascinating, really.
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I whimsically quote Vonnegut in response to this paradox: “How much longer can I go on being an atheist?” I say that in the most agnostic way possible, of course.
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Could be; could very well be. I’ll add it to the list of long-shots apparently required for (semi-)intelligent life. (Having a big Moon to create tidal pools; gas giants in the outer system to shield from bombardment; the symbiote that became mitochondria; a sane stable star; etc.)
Even giving these things generous odds, say 1/1000, their serial nature adds up to making us extremely rare. If just five events with odds at 1-to-10^3 are necessary, that’s a 1-to-10^15 chance for intelligent life such as ours.
The high-end estimate of stars in the MW galaxy is only 4×10^11, so good luck with that SETI. It’s possible we’re the only ones in the local group, let along the galaxy.
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OK. There here’s part of the paradox:
And since many of the stars similar to the Sun are billions of years older, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.[9]
However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened.
Perhaps this is because no convincing evidence has been found…until just last week?
Here are the latest developments. Check this out. It is not fake news. And “they” are not revealing the location. WTF is this? Ever read 2001 A Space Odyssey, or see the movie? Fiction becoming prophecy? I dunno.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/mysterious-shiny-monolith-found-in-otherworldly-utah-desert/2020/11/25/cfa844ce-2387-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html
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Yeah, what a fun gag to play on Utahns. Why didn’t the dudes pound on its side? Nice welds on the SS.
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Well, that was interesting. But I don’t think math can calculate infinite probability. Only because we don’t really know how infinite infinity really is. I could be wrong. I am quite often.
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