I love it when the argument gets to probabilities! Good old "standard deviations" and the "bell-shaped curve". I wonder what the odds are that our planet just happens to have a very active tectonic structure and that we are the right distance from the sun that water stays liquid for the most part. And how about that moon without which life as we know it, would not be possible...hangin' around out there at just the right distance! Have we reached 0.05% yet? When you go through all the "Goldilocks" factors our probability picture is mighty slim indeed. How many other similar planetary systems are there out there? Could be plenty...I don't know...odds are we will never know about them if the do exist.

I had an aunt that took a world cruise some years back. She flew to Japan to meet her tour group but she could locate no one. Finally she sat down in the Tokyo terminal to pray about the situation. She sat there a while then looked across the aisle and spotted an anglo appearing woman so she asked her if she spoke English. She certainly did she said in a slight Australian accent. She asked where she was from and the woman replied a little place in Australia named Wee Wah. My aunt thought she may have heard of the place before so she asked where the woman was from originally. The US she replied. Where? Oh an equally little town in Central California. I'm sure you have never heard of it...MacFarland?...to which my aunt replied "Your name is Clara Freer! The woman was astounded! How did you know that? "I'm Bob Carter's sister!"

This woman and her husband were my Dad's very close friends 20 years before they left to begin a cotton station Down Under. She had never met them but had heard all my Dad's fishing and hunting stories about them. So...out of all the billions of people in the world and the millions which pass through the Tokyo airport at any given time, what were the odds? 0.05? or less? I know many of you have similar stories and not just a few of them. What are the odds?

If you had a few quadrillion pots of water on an equal number of stoves all boiling right away, might one of them freeze solid because all the water molecules just happend to move in just the right way that they crystallized instead of continuing to boil? Probably not... and yet here is Earth, crawling with intelligent (theoretically) beings. What are the odds?