You can't compare a number of years or events with infinity. Saying it's tiny or huge makes no sense whatsoever.
What amazes me is how young the universe is compared to life. The universe is only about 4 times as old as life on Earth.
You can't compare a number of years or events with infinity. Saying it's tiny or huge makes no sense whatsoever.
What amazes me is how young the universe is compared to life. The universe is only about 4 times as old as life on Earth.
The comparison can be made; almost all positive integers can't practically be represented in hindu-arabic because they are too large. If we're dealing with numbers that can be scribed in a few seconds they are small in a meaningful way.
We'd expect that the mathematicians would need to come up with a new notation to represent the age of the universe.
Or to flip that around, life has existed on Earth for about 25% of the lifetime of the universe.
The fact that we are part of that life introduces some nasty sampling biases, but if we find even one more planet that shows a similar ratio, the implications will be that life is ubiquitous.