freediver wrote on Jun 30^th, 2008 at 11:24am:



Well according to this bloke about 95%.

Professor Paul Davies and Dr Charles Lineweaver outline their hypothesis in the latest issue of the journal Astrobiology. They say the aliens in question are likely to be primitive microbes that sprang up some four billion years ago. At this time the Earth was being buffeted by a hail of meteors and giant asteroids during what's known as the Archaean bombardment. Alternately, microbial life forms may have arrived on Earth from space and unobtrusively co-existed with us. Davies, of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Sydney's Macquarie University, admits the theory is speculative but says some of these microbes may have survived undetected to this day. Multiple life events He says statistics indicate there's a 95% chance of life on other Earth-like planets, a figure that he extrapolates to Earth itself. "I think it's a possibility [there are aliens among us]," he says. "The basic idea is that if life is easy to form as many astrobiologists suppose, then surely it should be formed more than once on Earth. "From what we know about the early record of life on Earth it happened pretty fast once conditions became suitable. "It's fairly easy to then work out the probability that if life began here on Earth, which is the most Earth-like planet there is, there's about a 95% chance that it would have done it more than once, maybe twice, three times. Who knows?"

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/04/13/1343196.htm

Do you take either of those estimates seriously?

I believe in God and aliens!

Atheist, both estimates would involve so many layers of assumptions that it would make them meaningless. They do not reflect the true liklihood at all. They merely reflect the assumptions made.

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I think I read somewhere that religious people are more likely to believe in luck, horoscopes, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. I'm not sure how reliable the source was though.