[pdabbadabba]

I think it's debatable, at best, whether Occam's razor would favor "an unknown process" over a known biological process. Especially when some research apparently has already been done, without success, to discover alternate processes.

(And, by the way, the unknown process could also be biological!)

[appleiigs]

Well... a biological process would be “rare” outside of earth, so if I was a betting man...

[DennisP]

Would it? Seems to me we have no idea how rare it is. For all we know it might be quite common.

[appleiigs]

You're implying we don't have any information at all. We do. Even if you argue is it's limited, to our knowledge bio processes outside of earth has been zero. Whereas, non-bio chemical processes is greater than zero. So now people want to bet on that it's bio??

[rsynnott]

I don’t think we can say that with any confidence.

[Koshkin]

Milky Way contains on the order of half a trillion star systems. Would having, say, a million planets carrying some form of life in our galaxy alone qualify as “rare”?

[saberdancer]

To be fair, I wouldn't consider that rare. When we talk about life, we usually think in terms of are we alone. If there are a million planets with life, life isn't rare, regardless of what percentage of planets have life.

[JauntTrooper]

We also know that our solar system has exactly the right conditions needed for life.

[brianberns]

No, we know that our planet has the right conditions for life. The conditions on Venus are very different.

[addicted]

That would be rare.

I also suspect 1 million is a massive underestimation.