Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

FellowConspirator t1_iyiie8r wrote

We don't have any meaningful way to answer the question on a universe scale.

It's reasonable to believe that many biological materials on Earth are probably exceptionally rare in the universe. They represent a minuscule portion of the mass of our own solar system, and, as far we can tell, Earth is the only place in our solars system where a majority of biomolecules can be found.

4

Nieshtze t1_iyj0t9q wrote

Yeah... extremely specific biomolecules (such as u/FellowConspirator's DNA) are likely to be present only on Earth and nowhere else.

3

[deleted] t1_iyj2gge wrote

[deleted]

−1

Abdiel_Kavash t1_iyk8ppt wrote

That is not how it works. You can have an infinite number of events, out of which each event repeats only finitely many times.

Example: There are infinitely many natural numbers. Only one of them is equal to 2.

4

jqbr t1_iyl5dsr wrote

No, that does not follow. Consider that rational fractions like 1/7 have infinite decimal expansions but only a very small number of patterns occur. Even for irrational numbers with non-repeating expansions like pi or sqrt (2) we can't be certain that every pattern occurs.

1