Why do we assume that extraterrestrial life is carbon-based?

Isn't this a
very Earth-centric view?

Robert Frost, Instructor and Flight Controller at NASA

Answered Dec 5
Originally Answered: Why do we assume that extraterrestrial life is carbon-based? Isn't this a very Earth-
centric view? It seems to me likely that there are many elements we haven't even discovered.
Is it possible that life elsewhere might not be carbon-based? Certainly. But it is more likely
that it is carbon-based. Why? Chemistry.

I've highlighted a column in the periodic table, with a red border. Carbon is at the top of this
column. Carbon is the lightest, most abundant, element with four valence electrons in a shell
capable of eight. That means a carbon atom can form four covalent bonds while nitrogen
(to its right) can form three and oxygen (to nitrogen's right) can form two. Here is a diagram
of methane, an example of carbon using all four bonds.

Carbon can also form double bonds, allowing strong (but not so strong the molecules can't
change), complex, branching molecules, like this butene molecule.

This means carbon is a light and abundant element capable of forming very complex and
flexible molecules. Life is complex. Life needs to be flexible to survive.

But what about the other elements in the red box? Well, there is something called the
double bond rule that says period 3 and below do not readily form double bonds. If they
do, the bonds are weak. So, the lower we go down that column the less likely life can form
based on that element. Silicon can form double bonds with itself, forming diselenes which
are unstable. Silicon is a possibility for life, but far less likely than carbon. Science fiction
authors like to use it, such as in the Star Trek episode, Devil in the Dark, where the crew of
the Enterprise met the silicon-based Horta.
 So, the primary reason we look for carbon-based life is that it is more likely to exist. But the
secondary reason is that we know what it looks like. There might be other life out there that
is not carbon-based, but it might be so foreign to us that we wouldn't recognize it as life.

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Why do so many things follow Normal Distribution?

Dale L Olausen, Statistician (semi-retired) (1991-present)

Updated Aug 5, 2019 · Upvoted by Sāmapriẏa Basu (সামপ্রিয় বসু), Ph.D. Probability & Stochastic Differential
Equations, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill … and Denis Berthier, studied Mathematics & Logic
at École Polytechnique, Université Paris-Saclay (1970)

It is an interesting question, and one that is rarely addressed in any great depth in
introductory stats courses. After that, the fact of the normal distribution becomes so
“normal” that it rarely is addressed in more advanced courses either. I will try to keep my
reasoning on a fairly intuitive level, so a general audience can get some benefit from it (I
hope).

First off, the average person might well ask “what is a normal distribution”? It is that
mathematical creature that you might have also heard of as a “bell curve” or perhaps a
Gaussian distribution. The former term relates to its visual appearance (as seen below), while
the latter relates to one of its most famous discoverers, the brilliant mathematician Gauss.
This picture represents something called the standard normal distribution. The x-axis
represents different values of some real data distribution, and the y-values represent the
rate of change in the probability of a variable actually taking on that value. All data that is
normally distributed can be converted to this standard normal distribution, and therefore
can be analysed by one set of principles, that apply to this picture.

In the middle is the mean value, what people generally refer to as the average. To the left
and right are values that deviate from this average, expressed in a form called standard
deviations. As the picture shows, in a normally distributed set of data, about two thirds of all
values will fall within one standard deviation of the mean, with 95% falling within two
standard deviations, and 99% falling within three standard deviations. So, normally
distributed datasets have some very predictable properties, which is nice. They also have the
nice property of being symmetrical around the mean, as the picture shows. These two
properties are invaluable to statisticians and data scientists, in terms of using mathematics
and algorithms to predict many features of the real world.

The other important thing about the normal distribution, is that many, many situations in
the real world can be modelled by a normal distribution, or at least come very close to a
normal distribution. In fact, it tends to be the “go-to” distribution, for most purposes. Some
examples are the heights of a random population of people, an IQ distribution or the
pattern of misses that a shooter makes around a bullseye.
Getting back to the original question, why is it that so many real-world data distribution
take this form? The usual explanation is given by another name for the normal distribution,
which is the “error distribution”. The idea is that errors are generally random, so that they
are as likely to go in one direction as in the other. For example, the marksman is as likely to
shoot a bit to the left, as a bit to the right, or a bit high as a bit low. Thus, a graph of how far
the shots are from the bullseye will reflect this random tendency, and be symmetrical
around the mean. Similarly with height and intelligence – many genes (perhaps thousands)
contribute to these outcomes, as do a great number of environmental factors, such as
nutrition, illnesses, low income and so forth.

As for the “bell shape” of the curve, that seems to relate to some other facts about
probability, the Bernoulli process and the Central Limit Theorem. A Bernoulli process is a
process that has a set probability of success or failure, like tossing a coin. The Central Limit
says that if you take a large number of samples from any distribution, and analyse some
statistic from that group of samples, you will eventually get a normal distribution for that
distribution. I put those two facts together, in the experiment below.

In this experiment, I tossed a coin sixteen times, and counted the number of heads. As I
increased the number of trials, that distribution became closer and closer to a normal
distribution. I simulated this in an Excel spreadsheet, with the results shown below:
You can see how the graph becomes more and more like the classic “bell shaped curve” as
the number of simulated trials goes from 40 to 4000. Just how many trials are needed to get
“close enough” to a normal distribution is somewhat debatable, but for many statistical
purposes, it’s probably “normal enough” at about 100 trials, as many statistical and/or data
science methods are fairly robust, in this regard.
Here’s a quote from a book I own called “The Pleasures of Probability”, by Richard Isaac:

“The Central Limit Theorem is sometimes used to give a theoretical explanation for the
frequency with which normal or approximately normal distributions describe natural
phenomena. It is said that the height of an adult, for example, is due to a multitude of
causes: genetic makeup, diet, environmental factors, etc.. These factors often combine in an
approximately additive way, so that the result is, by the Central Limit Theorem, close to
normally distributed. It is true that all these factors contributing to an individual’s height do
not in general have the same distribution, nor are they always independent, so the version
of the Central Limit Theorem discussed here may not apply. There are, however,
generalizations of the Central Limit Theorem valid when there are departures from the
identically distributed assumption, and even from the independence assumption. Such
results could offer a reasonable explanation of why many phenomena are approximately
normally distributed.” (page 138)

It is worth noting that there are many other statistical distributions that show up in real data.
One of the most important of these is the power law, which describes many natural (e.g. the
size distribution of craters on the moon) and social (e.g. book or movie sales) data
distributions.

It’s important to recognize when normal distribution assumptions are valid. The author of
the popular economics book “The Black Swan” goes into this in some detail, but that’s
another story (basically, unexpected things happen a lot more often than we expect from
our assumptions of normality, and when they do, they can have very drastic consequences,
like stock market crashes).
 It is also important to know the difference between a normal distribution and a ghost:

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