The ones that survived, anyway…
Let’s be fair, butt probes are preferred to complete annihilation.
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There is not life on earth because it is a habitable planet. As we humans are about to find out, earth is only habitable because for billions of years life has strived to make it so.
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yes
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Maybe they just think we’re gross…
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Well, it is habitable for us because we evolved here and adapted to it’s conditions. It is quite presumptuous for us to assume that “habitable for us” is the same as “habitable in general.” There were critters existing quite happily on an anoxic Earth a couple billion years ago until some out-of-control photosynthesizers released quantities of pollution that radically altered the environment to the point that it became toxic for almost everything on the planet. Would those anaerobes have ever evolved beyond slime? No clue. Maybe? With an n=1 sample, we don’t know what the limits of adaptability are. We do seem bound and determined to find out our own, though.
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Something keeps life from reaching the level of interstellar colonization–if it didn’t those radio signals would be from nearby, not from vast distances.
We have basically proven that there are plenty of planets and looking at how fast life evolved on Earth that’s also pretty easy.
That leaves only three fundamental issues:
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Does the planet remain habitable for long enough–humanity squeaked by under the wire, even 2% longer to reach intelligence and it wouldn’t have happened. We are also overdue for a hit from a reset button. (Earth should be hit by something at that level on average once every 2 billion years.)
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Does intelligence always destroy itself (at least as far as being able to reach the stars. If we blow ourselves back to the stone age we won’t rise again even if we aren’t extinct.)
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Does intelligence always turn inward and not go to the stars? I find this one quite unlikely.
Either we are extremely lucky (at win-powerball levels) or something is going to happen to us in the not too far future.
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It strikes me that our sample size of n=1 may not be that useless. The probability of life evolving on earth is 1. Maybe that’s because that probability is 1. And exactly this mix of oxygen and nitrogen is optimal, and that any life bound by strict Darwinian rules will tend towards it. So we will be able to rock up to blue planets and discard our helmets immediately. Well, except for the microbes, they’ll kill us dead immediately. Ahem.
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One thing that’s clear from looking back over the last few billion years: life is generally a competition for resources. So, likely to find life anywhere there are:
- an energy source, doesn’t have to be stellar
- reactable resources not bound in solids
- enough of both that cover enough area to allow “warring factions” and therefore natural selection
Otherwise, why would we want to specify what those conditions would look like? They could be ammonia or methane based. They could be a hot Venusian atmosphere. They could be a certain layer of gaseous planets. They could be in a liquid sea under 10 miles of ice on a volcanic planet with no atmosphere. Who knows? Life could literally be anywhere that meets basic criteria.
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Another thing to consider if humans became multiplanetary is that someone who was born and grew up on Mars would likely have a great deal of trouble surviving Earth sunlight and gravitational force. Settling on Mars would be basically a one-way trip.
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Obligs as ever:
Given our shitty track record with how we treat our own planet and one another, it would make perfect sense for an advanced civilization to keep their presence undetectable.
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Maybe we are being quarantined by the rest of the galaxy.
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Can’t say I blame them.
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Oh, not useless at all. It proves definitively that life, and intelligent life, is absolutely possible. However, it cannot be used to place bounds on that. What is the likelihood of life developing, and what are the limiting factors? If it is as simple as a fluid-ish medium and an energy source, there should be life on a huge variety of worlds and moons. As you add more restraints, the odds get worse. A star of sufficient lifespan and sufficiently quiescent, a gas giant to bounce a large number of incoming bolides out of system, a large moon to stabilize the wobble and spin, specific gas mixtures, magnetic field strength and temperature range have all been proposed as limiting factors, but we just don’t know. We know that our particular situation resulted in intelligent life, well, for a certain range of “intelligent,” but that does not help with estimating how far from these settings you can go and still get intelligence. The possibility exists that we are pretty marginal and other settings can give rise to life and intelligence much faster, or that we are absolutely optimal and are actually the first to get there. Until we find other examples we won’t know. If it turns out that Venus, Mars, Titan, Europa and Ganymede all are home to some form of life then we know that the parameters are looser than we had thought. If there is evidence for complexity, lots looser. If we find nothing on any of them (a situation I find unlikely) we have not really learned anything. We have barely dipped our toes into the foam at the edge of the ocean. Hypothesizing about what could be out there is almost irresistible, but equally almost certain to look foolish in retrospect when (if) we actually find out some of what there is.
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- Paragraph breaks are your friend
- You made an excellent point
- You might enjoy Europa Report. A “found footage” film with the premise of searching for life on the eponymous Jovian moon
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That’s the Zoo Hypothesis, also a possibility.
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If you read most of my stuff, you will find I write in a very much stream of consciousness style and don’t really edit. Not the easiest to read, but since I write during breaks between patients, its the best I can do.
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I joke about that sort of thing all the time. No worries. Still, you made excellent point and it reminded me of the movie pick.
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Though that’s usually a minor pet peeve of mine as well, you get a pass from me, Doc.
Also, I can’t believe no one has posted this yet:
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Seconding the recommendation of Europa Report. It’s a really good movie.
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Or this
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