Is Earth actually special?

Fermi famously postulated that given the universe’s near-infinite size, even a very small probability of life on any one planet would translate to near-certainty of there being life somewhere outside our solar system. Unfortunately, many people mis-apply Fermi’s reasoning and conclude that life is common in the universe. That is monumentally wrong. Actually, his point was the opposite: the universe is so very, VERY big that even extraordinarily improbable things will still happen.

Earth’s ecosystem is a gobsmackingly improbable anomaly. For each 1 cubic mile of habitable space, our solar system contains 350 quintillion (350 followed by 18 zeroes) cubic miles of deadly space. This means that the probability of a random draw of habitable space from within our solar system is 0.0000000000000000003%.

Looking slightly further afield, the nearest planet that has even a small chance of being habitable is 4.2 light years away. That means we live at the center of a dead-space sphere 8.4 light years in diameter. That sphere contains more than 100 million trillion trillion (100 with another 30 zeroes) cubic miles in which ours is the only oasis that has coalesced from the chaos. So, in the neighborhood around our solar system, the conditions for life as we know it are but a 0.000000000000000000000000000001% probability.

Because we are embedded in our rich oasis, life is the rule in our experience, so we cannot easily see the truth: in Earth, we have inherited the mother of all lottery tickets.