Life Probability Quotes

There are millions of stars out there. It is difficult to think that life does not exist in any one of them.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life.

The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we're alone in the universe.

If we do discover more than one type of life on Earth, we can be fairly certain that the universe is teeming with it, for it would be inconceivable that life started twice here but never on all the other earth-like planets.

In fact, if one considers the possible constants and laws that could have emerged, the odds against a universe that produced life like ours are immense.

By the law of averages, there has to be life elsewhere. The universe is so huge, and I don't think God would have created this whole big huge cosmos and just say there's only going to be life on Earth, and that's it.

The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds.

We haven't yet found a speck of evidence for biology on another world, so we have no objective way to judge whether life is a onetime fluke or a near-inevitable phenomenon.

The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing. Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces?

If few worlds have microbial life, it dramatically reduces the chances that more complex organisms exist.

You can't take this speck of dust in this midst of all this incredible panorama of birth and complexifying and say...this is the only place that [life] happens. It's like turning your back on the whole idea of growth and evolution.

Once we get beyond Mars, which formed from the same stuff as Earth, the likelihood that life is similar to what we find on this planet is very low.

All we can say is that with hundreds of thousands of nebulae, each containing thousands of millions of suns, the odds are enormous that there must be immense numbers which possess planets whose circumstances would not render life impossible. If we are sufficiently self-centered and choose to deny that any of these support life, no one can prove we are wrong. But I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.

Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.

I should say we know that there are many, many other Earths out there. We're almost certain that there will be upwards of a billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, so there is no lack of real estate where life might happen, but what we don't know is how likely it is given the real estate, given a wonderful pristine planet like Earth how likely is it that life will pop up inhabited? We don't know the answer to that.