[vikingerik]

The odds of this group of people, on this day, finding this piece of the shuttle, are of course astronomically small.

The odds of some group out of millions of people, on some day out of ten thousand since the incident, finding some piece of debris out of thousands, are considerably higher.

This is the multiple-endpoints fallacy. You only notice the events that happened after the fact, you never notice everything that doesn't happen.

[Alan_Dillman]

Exactly.

This is why it is dumb when people say "The odds against life arising at random is astronomical."

It did happen, therefore, the convoluted path to life wasn't what the skeptic speaker thinks it was.

Multiple-endpoints fallacy and overly anthropomorphizing reality also makes a fool out of the Drake Equation, and the idea of "The Great Filter" is dumb too.

[wizofaus]

Going on the evidence we have, it's certainly not impossible that our own planet (one out of something like 10^25 likely planets in the universe) happens to be the only one that life has arisen on, which I'd say qualifies as astronomical odds against for any random planet at least.

[pixl97]

Let's give this one a few centuries and see how many exo-planets have life before deciding how rare it actually is.

[vikingerik]

Right. The odds against intelligent, industrial life arising at this star in this galaxy were astronomical. The odds against it arising somewhere among trillions of stars and galaxies are much less so.

But I'm not so sure about that last. The Drake equation and Great Filter do handle the multiple-endpoints question correctly. They ask, with so many possible occurrences in the scale of the universe, why don't we see any of them?