That’s Paley’s Teleological argument from the 18th century. It’s a classic but back then you have to remember clocks were more impressive.
The modern day spin on it is the “fine tuning” argument. Basically: the chances of life existing at all with our earth and the solar system being in a goldilocks zone seems too perfect to be a coincidence. You can probably explain it with selection bias but it’s a better argument nonetheless.
Which would make sense if this was the only solar system in the galaxy. 1 in 8 chance (rip Pluto) is pretty impressive, but when you include the rest of the galaxy 1 in however many trillion stars with however many trillions of planets is pretty low odds. Mathematically there should be more planets with life on them, so either we can’t find them, they’re too far away, they all killed themselves, or some other reason is preventing us from finding them.
rare enough and spread out enough (both in time and space) that we may never encounter another ‘intelligent’ civilization, or evidence of one, during our own extremely minuscule window of existence in the grand history of time.
That’s Paley’s Teleological argument from the 18th century. It’s a classic but back then you have to remember clocks were more impressive.
The modern day spin on it is the “fine tuning” argument. Basically: the chances of life existing at all with our earth and the solar system being in a goldilocks zone seems too perfect to be a coincidence. You can probably explain it with selection bias but it’s a better argument nonetheless.
Which would make sense if this was the only solar system in the galaxy. 1 in 8 chance (rip Pluto) is pretty impressive, but when you include the rest of the galaxy 1 in however many trillion stars with however many trillions of planets is pretty low odds. Mathematically there should be more planets with life on them, so either we can’t find them, they’re too far away, they all killed themselves, or some other reason is preventing us from finding them.
rare enough and spread out enough (both in time and space) that we may never encounter another ‘intelligent’ civilization, or evidence of one, during our own extremely minuscule window of existence in the grand history of time.