I beg to differ with you. If you were to take a box full of 1000 coins and throw them all over the floor, it is indeed absurdly likely that at least one will be heads. You could safely bet your life on the outcome. Yes, it is possible to get 1000 tails. It will happen, on average, 1 time out of 10 ^ 300 times. To put that in perspective, you could try this once per second for the entire age of the universe and probably never have it happen.
Oh, I'd be crazy to disagree with this. Yes. Of course.
What I differ on is not this coin thingy.
It is the using of the coins as anything even remotely similar to LIFE/NO LIFE.
I'll repeat my point.
Anything which is ACTUAL cannot be put on the balance scale next to a POSSIBLE for a weighing. A POSSIBLE does NOT exist, you see. (I know that sounds so simple that it is almost a tautology).
But, I'm serious. You cannot make one side of this coin an ACTUAL and the other side a Possible because, in this model alone, both sides are ACTUAL (Actually heads and actually tails.) You see, this extreme difference is so subtle (maybe to me) it is easy to miss.
"NO-LIFE is the ACTUAL" you might say. But, no. For the sake of discussion we can SAY that. However, it isn't so. NO-life is zero, zip, nada. That cannot be ACTUAL. It is non-everything and not a value.
Zero, to paraphrase the obvious, is a mere place-holder and a convenience. From the concept of Zero you could never postulate numbers into existence. You can only postulate zero from the ALREADY-EXISTING numbers and ask, "What's missing?" You see. It is conceptual and it is semantic. But, it isn't nuts and bolts.(edited to say: zero has to have special math laws or rules applied to it so that it will work. For example: you cannot divide by it. Were it actual you would not have to include a special rule (special pleading, as it were) to use it.)
Please don't misunderstand my point.
I'm merely fault-finding with any model that purports to use as analogus sets of either/or in which life/non-existence is considered binary. It is not.
We have life and we have the absence of life; but, (to beat this horse carcass) they are not opposites and are not commensurable by any standard of measurement.
So, from this it follows we cannot compute LIKLIHOOD of the appearance of life based on the existence of life. We can only ask, "What's missing?"
Our missing "zero" is our place-holder which translates into a concept of UNDISCOVERED LIFE.
But, there is no liklihood. There is no unliklihood.
That is what I'm saying. (And not making a cogent point of :)