I adopt this hypothesis not because I believe it to be true (at present I have no reason to prefer the hypothesis of the uniqueness of terrestrial life or the prevalence of life in the universe), but only because it is a useful point of departure for thinking about life in the universe. If we were to establish that life is unique and distinctive to Earth, there would be as little to say as there would be to say of a universe with zero life, so we begin with the hypothesis that life is sufficiently common in the universe that there are enough instances of independent origins of life events that statistically valid generalizations can be made regarding its distribution. My prediction will be concerned with the latter, not the former I am not going to predict how much life there is in the universe, or the frequency of its appearance in space or time. Any interesting prediction regarding the distribution of life in the universe will either be a prediction of whether our universe exemplifies one or many, or it would be a prediction regarding the distribution of the many instances of life in the universe. Taking each the horns of this dilemma in turn, if life on Earth is unique, there is nothing more to say about the distribution of life in the universe: it has a distribution of one, limited to Earth. In the context of the zero one infinity rule, we know that the appearance of life in the universe does not exemplify zero, so either life in our universe is one or many. “In short, ‘zero, one, many’ means either that a natural phenomenon never happens (time running backward, for example), or it happens exactly once (a ‘singularity’ like the Big Bang), or it has happened more times than we can count (perhaps the origin of life).” (Robert Hazen, Symphony in C: Carbon and the Evolution of (Almost) Everything, p. Robert Hazen, despite being the careful scientist that he is, gives a metaphysical spin to the zero one infinity rule: This is a rule of thumb for programming, but it also can be interpreted in a much wider sense.
#Oregon coast tru to da game bullypedia software#
There is a rule in software development called the zero one infinity rule, or ZOI, originally formulated by Willem van der Poel, according to which a process should be completely disallowed, or allowed only once, or no limit should be placed on the number of times it occurs. Two Predictions about the Distribution of Life in the Universe
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