Indeed. I'm not the one drawing unsafe conclusions from startlingly insufficient data.
Take your Pandora analogy. In this scenario, we will have found intelligent life on exactly two planets - intelligence on Earth being ironically relative, of course. The only safe conclusion is that intelligent life arose on two planets, extending our range of expectation for such life to the physical extremes of both worlds combined. Thus we can anticipate that the next planet we find that fits into those parameters might conceivably have intelligent life, but we can hardly state categorically that it does, or that it must.
You're not only putting the cart before the horse, you're saying that all carts have horses behind them until proven otherwise.
Take your Pandora analogy. In this scenario, we will have found intelligent life on exactly two planets - intelligence on Earth being ironically relative, of course. The only safe conclusion is that intelligent life arose on two planets, extending our range of expectation for such life to the physical extremes of both worlds combined. Thus we can anticipate that the next planet we find that fits into those parameters might conceivably have intelligent life, but we can hardly state categorically that it does, or that it must.
You're not only putting the cart before the horse, you're saying that all carts have horses behind them until proven otherwise.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
