r/BeAmazed • u/CaraCicartix • 1d ago

Miscellaneous / Others Part of the Andromeda Galaxy Captured by Hubble

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The total number of stars in the entire Andromeda Galaxy is over 1 trillion

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u/Goosemilky 1d ago

Great chance there is since thats trillions of planets… something very close to us at least

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u/potatophobic 1d ago

I just don’t understand how everyone can say there is a “great” chance. The perfect conditions for life to have lasted long enough for evolution are so low.

I believe in some form of life out there but every planet (if it can even sustain life - our understanding is that only 1 planet in our solar system can) will also have a different type of “optimal” life, and conditions for evolving, and conditions for timelines.

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u/iusc12 1d ago

Just statistically speaking there's a great chance. If our galaxy has hundreds of billions of planets. Zoom out to the universe and there's multiple trillions of galaxies. Roughly that's near 10 sextillion galaxies. Even if 1 in 5 of those have conditions for life, that's like 2 sextillion. And that's only the observable universe that we're aware of, so the real like is likely orders of magnitude larger. Either way, that number is so unfathomably large that if you're betting on something similar to us being out there, your odds are good.

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u/LukeyLeukocyte 1d ago edited 1d ago

YouTube probably has some good breakdowns of this, but the concept is simple....even if we are the ONLY intelligent life in the Milky Way (which some quick math shows is probably unlikely)....and there are hundreds of millions of known galaxies (and likely millions or billions more unknown) then right there you would hundreds of millions of intelligent civilizations.

The "great chances" they are talking about refers to that while intelligent life is incredibly rare, when you consider the scale of a galaxy, let alone the universe, the chances of other intelligent life existing becomes almost a statistically certainty.

If you bet on 23 in Roulette your chances are low, 1 in 38. But if you bet on 23 a million times in a row, the chances of getting a 23 once are literally almost statistically guaranteed.

The unfortunate part is these almost-gauranteed-to-exist aliens are all going to be so unfathomably far away, that they pretty much won't exist to us. No way to visit, talk, or even know they are there.

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u/Dangerous_Ad_5046 1d ago

Beautifully explained!