RAZD wrote:
You typically seem to think survival is an all or nothing situation at every juncture. It isn't. The world is gray.
What survived is what survived, and it may have had as much to do with luck as anything when the asteroid hit.
I do agree with this. The K-T extinction certainly was a stroke of bad luck for life on Earth, but disasters like this one, or worse, occurred fairly often over geologic time. The world is gray, and luck in the form of random coincidence is an operative. Given this grayness and randomness in the course of biological evolution here on Earth, I have to conclude that the evolution of human consciousness was manifestly too gray and too lucky to have occurred anywhere else in the universe. I used to go along with Isaac Asimov's contention that the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations was 1.0. But eventually I had to agree with S. J. Gould that there were just too many gray and random events ocurring in the course of biological evolution on Earth to expect that organic evolution should follow the same course on any other planet. (Thus the foolishness of SETI.)
”HM