Science is not definite. It's science, so it changes. It doesn't mean it's right. It's what we currently know to be true. And until we know exactly how life begins, (As in create artificial life on earth) we can't be placing "accurate" numbers.
Again, that's the beauty of odds. The numbers don't necessarily
need to be accurate, they just need to point to a likelihood one way or another.
There's a huge difference between, say, a 1% chance of something happening and a 100% chance of something happening - but both figures accurately reflect a chance that something will happen.
The distinction here is that you could also suggest a 99% chance that something
won't happen and a
100% chance that something
won't happen. The former is still a chance that something
will happen, and the latter a certainty that it
won't.
As it is, ET is firmly in the former camp, which makes it a statistical likelihood purely because of the huge numbers involved - such as the one I mentioned a few posts ago, in which even a trillionth of a percent of there being life elsewhere would still point to 100 million planets on which life could exist. Those sort of numbers are statistically significant.
And yes, science changes, but once again - humankind, and every other species on earth, is measurable evidence that life works in certain ways, and since rules are generally accepted to remain as they are throughout the universe, there's currently no strong evidence to suggest things should be any different.
I really can't see what you're batting at here - you're arguing against accepted scientific methods and statistical likelihoods, and I'm sure you've even said yourself somewhere a while back that you think that ET life could exist - so where are we going with this?
Incidentally, I just popped back 7 pages to try and discover where this discussion actually started, and I think it was around about this comment:
So you basically believe there is an intelligent designer of some sort. I think that would be my view at the very lowest point. This is simply because I just could not come to grips with believing that every single part of our universe, be it the galaxies, the stars, the planets, and life itself, just happened to come about by chance.
...and I think this might be a better place for continuing the discussion as it seems rather closer to the topic at hand!
I can understand that it's difficult to believe how the universe started in the way it did and that the concept of a higher, god-like power provides a nice, easy answer to how everything got going, but thinking that everything happened "by chance" is too simplistic a way of looking at it, IMO.