Quote:

How different is this from asking yourself "Had my mother and father not met, I would not be alive. Had my father procreated with another women or my mother with another man, I would not have been born and thus I would not be alive. Thus, for 100% of other combinations of human partners, they 'might' lead to another life, but certainly not 'ME'"




With the same argument you could "prove" that no one would ever win in a lottery due to the improbability of this. The flaw lies in mixing different probability concepts. There are millions of lottery tickets issued, thus the probability of someone winning is a hundred percent. Were there only one ticket ever issued, winning would certainly require some further explanation - at least for a curious scientist.

The same applies to the universe.

Quote:

For most of the past time of the universe, Carbon Based (CB) life was impossible. For most of the future time of the universe, CB life will again be impossible. As a matter of fact, if the universe truly is flat and ever expanding, then as the universes age approaches infinity, the window where CB life is sustainable approaches zero, thus making this universe devoid of life and asymptotically raising the probability that life doesn't exist in this universe to 100%.




Mostly true, though in fact for most of the past time, about 10 billion years, carbon based life was very well possible. But this is not the point here. It's about under which conditions life it possible at all at one time in the universe.

Quote:

And I agree with Whine that this whole dicussion is grossly ethnocentric and assumes that CB life is teh only type of life. We have no way of knowing there isn't some other form of life that can evolve in the quark-gluon plasma at the birst of the universe nor can we say with certainty that life won't evolve into something else in the cold, dark ends of time.




This is correct, but still not the point. Development of intelligent life, no matter whether based on carbon, silicon, or unknown processes requires an energy source and an environment allowing evolution. For instance, in a universe filled with nothing but a thin expanding gas - and that's a much more likely universe than ours - life can not develop.

BTW I like the rock images, too.