<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>V-2</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;How, when given the evidence of practically infinite planets out there [...] can we even consider the possibility that this is the only planet with life?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Human minds aren&amp;#x27;t good with very large numbers. What seems &amp;quot;practically infinite&amp;quot; to us - isn&amp;#x27;t, really.&lt;p&gt;The number of all planets in the universe is said to be in the ballpark of 10^24.&lt;p&gt;Meaning (obviously) if you keep on dividing it by 10, in just 24 steps you get down to 1.&lt;p&gt;Meaning if there are 24 factors crucial for life to evolve, and each has a 10% chance of occurring - it&amp;#x27;s actually quite likely only one planet would win on this lottery. (At a given point in time, that is - that&amp;#x27;s another aspect of course).&lt;p&gt;Or 12 factors, but each with a 1% chance. 
And suddenly it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like a number big enough to warrant certainty claims...&lt;p&gt;Basically it is the &amp;quot;wheat and chessboard&amp;quot; problem in reverse.&lt;p&gt;You start with a huge pile of planets, but once you start splitting the pile, it shrinks very very fast.&lt;p&gt;Personally I&amp;#x27;m not &lt;i&gt;sure&lt;/i&gt; either way, and I think being sure (either way) is just naive.&lt;p&gt;I &lt;i&gt;believe&lt;/i&gt; there is microbial life out there, and I accept a slim chance we may actually discover it - say, over the course of the next few centuries - but I&amp;#x27;m sceptical about the existence of intelligent life, and even if it did exist, I see the chances of any contact to ever occur as zero.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Razengan</author><text>And some people &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; aren’t sure if there is other life beyond Earth. :)&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s entire &lt;i&gt;galaxies.&lt;/i&gt; Not just stars, and that&amp;#x27;s just the &lt;i&gt;observable&lt;/i&gt; universe.&lt;p&gt;We are still being surprised by the lifeforms we observe here on Earth, and the environments and conditions they can thrive in (including the outer hulls of our spacecraft), and we still have yet to discover and catalog all the life on our planet. Life may even come in the form of &amp;quot;artificial&amp;quot; constructs that build, learn, teach and reproduce on their own, created by &amp;quot;natural&amp;quot; life somewhere then set free into the cosmos.&lt;p&gt;How, when given the evidence of practically infinite planets out there (considering that almost every star may have at least one planet, and there are even rogue planets [0] that don&amp;#x27;t orbit any star, and that asteroids and comets or even dense nebulas could also harbor life), can we even consider the possibility that this is the only planet with life?&lt;p&gt;This game is Big, folks: &lt;i&gt;Even if 90% of all planets had life there would still be billions if not trillions of them without any life&lt;/i&gt;, and the incomprehensibly vast distances (including voids, like the one our own galaxy is near or inside of [1]) between them may mean millions of years before life from one planet encounters life from another (which is good I suppose; every species would have some room to expand into at their own pace.)&lt;p&gt;And of course, not all intelligent civilizations will be &amp;quot;successful.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;We will either die out on our home planet or expand.&lt;p&gt;We may not encounter other life for hundreds or even thousands of year after we develop interstellar travel, or the life that we encounter may turn out to be mundane and eventually unexciting (I mean, imagine being an spacefaring species discovering us; planetlocked and still collectively figuring many basic things out.)&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Rogue_planet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Rogue_planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Milky_Way#Environment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Milky_Way#Environment&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)</title><url>https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1620/?lang</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>piquadrat</author><text>@ASmallFiction had a beautiful, succinct take on this recently:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Are we alone in the universe?&amp;quot; she asked.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; said the Oracle.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;So there&amp;#x27;s no other life out there?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There is. They&amp;#x27;re alone too.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;ASmallFiction&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;946608733982822401&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;ASmallFiction&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;946608733982822401&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>Razengan</author><text>And some people &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; aren’t sure if there is other life beyond Earth. :)&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s entire &lt;i&gt;galaxies.&lt;/i&gt; Not just stars, and that&amp;#x27;s just the &lt;i&gt;observable&lt;/i&gt; universe.&lt;p&gt;We are still being surprised by the lifeforms we observe here on Earth, and the environments and conditions they can thrive in (including the outer hulls of our spacecraft), and we still have yet to discover and catalog all the life on our planet. Life may even come in the form of &amp;quot;artificial&amp;quot; constructs that build, learn, teach and reproduce on their own, created by &amp;quot;natural&amp;quot; life somewhere then set free into the cosmos.&lt;p&gt;How, when given the evidence of practically infinite planets out there (considering that almost every star may have at least one planet, and there are even rogue planets [0] that don&amp;#x27;t orbit any star, and that asteroids and comets or even dense nebulas could also harbor life), can we even consider the possibility that this is the only planet with life?&lt;p&gt;This game is Big, folks: &lt;i&gt;Even if 90% of all planets had life there would still be billions if not trillions of them without any life&lt;/i&gt;, and the incomprehensibly vast distances (including voids, like the one our own galaxy is near or inside of [1]) between them may mean millions of years before life from one planet encounters life from another (which is good I suppose; every species would have some room to expand into at their own pace.)&lt;p&gt;And of course, not all intelligent civilizations will be &amp;quot;successful.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;We will either die out on our home planet or expand.&lt;p&gt;We may not encounter other life for hundreds or even thousands of year after we develop interstellar travel, or the life that we encounter may turn out to be mundane and eventually unexciting (I mean, imagine being an spacefaring species discovering us; planetlocked and still collectively figuring many basic things out.)&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Rogue_planet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Rogue_planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Milky_Way#Environment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Milky_Way#Environment&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)</title><url>https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1620/?lang</url></story>