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There are so many potential reasons why life would be incapable of existing on a planet in the "Goldilocks Zone" that we can't even fathom. It could even come d

There are so many potential reasons why life would be incapable of existing on a planet in the "Goldilocks Zone" that we can't even fathom. It could even come down to something as simple as the infinite potential variations in elemental composition for a given planet. Not to mention the sheer enormity of time required for something like abiogenesis to occur and those forms of life to evolve into something we could actually discover, even when the conditions are suitable. We can't calculate those odds. We can't even start. It's like trying to calculate the likelihood that future AI will destroy humanity. We just can't know because it's so deeply theoretical. For that reason, it seems absolutely absurd to me that someone would say with certainty that life exists elsewhere in the universe. We just can't know. The unlikelihood of its existence could be infinitely high and we might just be lottery winners. Who knows? And frankly, I hope we're alone. I really don't want to share the universe. It would be so much nicer just to have it to ourselves. Let us do what we want, wherever we want, without interference until the heat death of everything.

jaxomlotus 10y ago
Nobody says with certainty that life exists. But they do say the probability is so high that life in some form exists elsewhere, you might as well be certain. As for not sharing the universe: what a depressing thought.
- camelNotation 10y ago
  Why is that depressing? It's not like we would actually be ALONE. We have each other. We don't need Vulcans or whatever else to keep us company and suck up our resources.
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    When you put it that way, it doesn't actually matter. There's always going to be someone competing for resources. The only difference is whether they have hands or tentacles.
    - camelNotation 10y ago
      Another potential difference might be diet. Perhaps this other, tentacled species can't resist the taste of homo sapiens.
      - andrewflnr 10y ago
        Nope, still true with us alone.
kamaal 10y ago
>>It would be so much nicer just to have it to ourselves. Let us do what we want, wherever we want, without interference until the heat death of everything. For all practical purposes we have it all for ourselves and we are doing nothing with it. There is no serious investment in seeking a different home outside of earth.
- taneq 10y ago
  Give us time, sheesh. We only figured out how to write a few thousand years ago. If we've been here for a billion years and we still haven't gone anywhere, then you may complain.
nessus42 10y ago
> For that reason, it seems absolutely absurd to me that someone would say with certainty that life exists elsewhere in the universe. I'm not sure you have a conception of how truly BIG the universe is. In fact, according to current cosmological evidence, it is infinitely big. But even if we confine our discussion to our Hubble Sphere, there is almost certainly life elsewhere in the universe. It's just that that life might be very, very far away.
- verbify 10y ago
  My thoughts too. If we knew there were only 10,000 stars, it could seem likely that the chances of life existing are 1/50,000, and we happen to be lucky. But there are over 100 billion stars in the observable universe. I think the law of large numbers applies here. The likelihood of life existing being high enough that we are the only ones, but low enough that our existence isn't winning some 1 in a googolplex chance just strikes me as an anthropocentric conceit.
  - Buttons840 10y ago
    The size of the universe is a large number, but the chance of life just forming from chaos is 1/(a large number). So the odds of life elsewhere in the universe is, roughly, a large number divided by another large number. The question is which large number is larger? We don't know how difficult it is to create life. The universe is big, but the difficulty of creating life might be much bigger. Thus. It is not certain that there is life elsewhere.
    - MAGZine 10y ago
      Just today we found the closest star to us to have a planet in the habitable zone. The closest star. But, we struggle to observe it in any capacity. Indeed, only today we did. And that's nothing to say of the next closest star, or the next, or the next, ad (nearly) infinitum. If planets in this zone aren't as rare as we think, life in the universe might also not be as rare as we think. To me, the question is more "where," rather than "if."
    - 10y ago
yourapostasy 10y ago
> ...until the heat death of everything. If further climate outcomes continue to track Hansen's thus-far correct 35-year-old predictions [1], then we've already passed some kind of tipping point and "the heat death of everything" could potentially mean Venusian-style anthropogenic cooking of Earth in some worst-case scenarios, and mass population dislocations and mega-scale environmental disruptions in milder scenarios. If it turns out that life as we know it is exceedingly rare (and I must admit that the more we find out about exoplanets, the more disconcerted I am while realizing that the hazy possible solution space to the Fermi Paradox is becoming rather uncomfortable as the resolution grows with each passing decade), then that would be truly a tragic outcome. [1] https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/crystal-serenity/ https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/crystal-serenity/
- npongratz 10y ago
  I believe GP was referring to the heat death of the universe [0], which might be paraphrased as the death of heat in the universe, rather than lifeforms on one planet dying when the environment becomes too hot for said lifeforms to survive. [0] http://www.physlink.com/education/AskExperts/ae181.cfm http://www.physlink.com/education/AskExperts/ae181.cfm
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    I should have been clearer; I trying to note the irony of saying "heat death of everything" could be a much shorter timeframe than we usually mean when we say that phrase, if Hansen's forecasts turn out correct.
woodandsteel 10y ago
Not want to share? That's really dumb. If I have some things I use, I might not want to share them with someone else because then I can't use them. But we make no use at all of 99.999999999999999999999% of the universe, so how does it hurt us if some other species do?
- wyager 10y ago
  > so how does it hurt us if some other species do Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest has an interesting take on this. Basically it's conceivable that the game-theoretically optimal policy is to kill any other sentient species you come across, even if it means you lose access to whatever resources they currently have. This argument falls apart at some point, because it's (presumably) not optimal for all humans to try to kill each other all the time, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.
  - lmm 10y ago
    I found Blindsight/Echopraxia (released together as Firefall) a very interesting story on many levels, and it covers this kind of subject.
- corndoge 10y ago
  Yes, because if we make it out there, I don't want to deal with having to get rid of the life there just so we can use the space. I am sure humanity will advance to use at least 50% of the space before our sun goes nova, if Moore's law is any indicator of technological advancement.
WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
actually, the odd thing is how seemingly quickly abiogenesis seems to have occured on earth; few 100 million years give or take. This may mean that given proper planetary conditions, life just tends to happen rather easily - ie for a quite sizablle fraction of candidates at least. Or maybe that it's not going to happen at all unless it happens improbably quickly. Basically we can't say a much about what the fraction of planets that develop life to planets that have conditions for developing life is based on just one example, but there's no apriori reason for particular pessimism about that number just yet. Now how likely the conditions are to begin with is a different matter. They've certainly improved in the last decade, since planets at least seem to readily form and earth-sized things too, and apparently easily end up in orbits that could allow for water to exist etc. There's clearly a bunch of other potential conditions that may be necessary for abiogenesis -- untill we know more about how exactly it happens, we can't tell (and actually finding separate origins of life would greatly help in undestanding what that is) I for one think it very likely this particular planet isn't habitable, because Proxima is such a lousy star, but it's certainly not ruled out. But also that microbes are likely reasonably common in the universe. Around a small fraction of the total number of stars, only some small percentage of what we'd consider candidates today based on their sizes and orbits -- but still that leaves immense numbers.
drock88 10y ago
Why you don't want to share the universe? I think it will be so nice to have a company in this vast universe! Somehow we always feel that aliens would be always bad to humans, there might be good aliens also somewhere who might help us in solving our current diseases/share advance knowledge or even give us new resources!

jaxomlotus 10y ago

Nobody says with certainty that life exists. But they do say the probability is so high that life in some form exists elsewhere, you might as well be certain. As for not sharing the universe: what a depressing thought.

camelNotation 10y ago
Why is that depressing? It's not like we would actually be ALONE. We have each other. We don't need Vulcans or whatever else to keep us company and suck up our resources.
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  When you put it that way, it doesn't actually matter. There's always going to be someone competing for resources. The only difference is whether they have hands or tentacles.
  - camelNotation 10y ago
    Another potential difference might be diet. Perhaps this other, tentacled species can't resist the taste of homo sapiens.
    - andrewflnr 10y ago
      Nope, still true with us alone.

kamaal 10y ago

>>It would be so much nicer just to have it to ourselves. Let us do what we want, wherever we want, without interference until the heat death of everything. For all practical purposes we have it all for ourselves and we are doing nothing with it. There is no serious investment in seeking a different home outside of earth.

taneq 10y ago
Give us time, sheesh. We only figured out how to write a few thousand years ago. If we've been here for a billion years and we still haven't gone anywhere, then you may complain.

nessus42 10y ago

> For that reason, it seems absolutely absurd to me that someone would say with certainty that life exists elsewhere in the universe. I'm not sure you have a conception of how truly BIG the universe is. In fact, according to current cosmological evidence, it is infinitely big. But even if we confine our discussion to our Hubble Sphere, there is almost certainly life elsewhere in the universe. It's just that that life might be very, very far away.

verbify 10y ago
My thoughts too. If we knew there were only 10,000 stars, it could seem likely that the chances of life existing are 1/50,000, and we happen to be lucky. But there are over 100 billion stars in the observable universe. I think the law of large numbers applies here. The likelihood of life existing being high enough that we are the only ones, but low enough that our existence isn't winning some 1 in a googolplex chance just strikes me as an anthropocentric conceit.
- Buttons840 10y ago
  The size of the universe is a large number, but the chance of life just forming from chaos is 1/(a large number). So the odds of life elsewhere in the universe is, roughly, a large number divided by another large number. The question is which large number is larger? We don't know how difficult it is to create life. The universe is big, but the difficulty of creating life might be much bigger. Thus. It is not certain that there is life elsewhere.
  - MAGZine 10y ago
    Just today we found the closest star to us to have a planet in the habitable zone. The closest star. But, we struggle to observe it in any capacity. Indeed, only today we did. And that's nothing to say of the next closest star, or the next, or the next, ad (nearly) infinitum. If planets in this zone aren't as rare as we think, life in the universe might also not be as rare as we think. To me, the question is more "where," rather than "if."
  - 10y ago

yourapostasy 10y ago

> ...until the heat death of everything. If further climate outcomes continue to track Hansen's thus-far correct 35-year-old predictions [1], then we've already passed some kind of tipping point and "the heat death of everything" could potentially mean Venusian-style anthropogenic cooking of Earth in some worst-case scenarios, and mass population dislocations and mega-scale environmental disruptions in milder scenarios. If it turns out that life as we know it is exceedingly rare (and I must admit that the more we find out about exoplanets, the more disconcerted I am while realizing that the hazy possible solution space to the Fermi Paradox is becoming rather uncomfortable as the resolution grows with each passing decade), then that would be truly a tragic outcome. [1] https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/crystal-serenity/ https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/crystal-serenity/

npongratz 10y ago
I believe GP was referring to the heat death of the universe [0], which might be paraphrased as the death of heat in the universe, rather than lifeforms on one planet dying when the environment becomes too hot for said lifeforms to survive. [0] http://www.physlink.com/education/AskExperts/ae181.cfm http://www.physlink.com/education/AskExperts/ae181.cfm
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  I should have been clearer; I trying to note the irony of saying "heat death of everything" could be a much shorter timeframe than we usually mean when we say that phrase, if Hansen's forecasts turn out correct.

woodandsteel 10y ago

Not want to share? That's really dumb. If I have some things I use, I might not want to share them with someone else because then I can't use them. But we make no use at all of 99.999999999999999999999% of the universe, so how does it hurt us if some other species do?

wyager 10y ago
> so how does it hurt us if some other species do Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest has an interesting take on this. Basically it's conceivable that the game-theoretically optimal policy is to kill any other sentient species you come across, even if it means you lose access to whatever resources they currently have. This argument falls apart at some point, because it's (presumably) not optimal for all humans to try to kill each other all the time, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.
- lmm 10y ago
  I found Blindsight/Echopraxia (released together as Firefall) a very interesting story on many levels, and it covers this kind of subject.
corndoge 10y ago
Yes, because if we make it out there, I don't want to deal with having to get rid of the life there just so we can use the space. I am sure humanity will advance to use at least 50% of the space before our sun goes nova, if Moore's law is any indicator of technological advancement.

WilliamDhalgren 10y ago

actually, the odd thing is how seemingly quickly abiogenesis seems to have occured on earth; few 100 million years give or take. This may mean that given proper planetary conditions, life just tends to happen rather easily - ie for a quite sizablle fraction of candidates at least. Or maybe that it's not going to happen at all unless it happens improbably quickly. Basically we can't say a much about what the fraction of planets that develop life to planets that have conditions for developing life is based on just one example, but there's no apriori reason for particular pessimism about that number just yet. Now how likely the conditions are to begin with is a different matter. They've certainly improved in the last decade, since planets at least seem to readily form and earth-sized things too, and apparently easily end up in orbits that could allow for water to exist etc. There's clearly a bunch of other potential conditions that may be necessary for abiogenesis -- untill we know more about how exactly it happens, we can't tell (and actually finding separate origins of life would greatly help in undestanding what that is) I for one think it very likely this particular planet isn't habitable, because Proxima is such a lousy star, but it's certainly not ruled out. But also that microbes are likely reasonably common in the universe. Around a small fraction of the total number of stars, only some small percentage of what we'd consider candidates today based on their sizes and orbits -- but still that leaves immense numbers.

drock88 10y ago

Why you don't want to share the universe? I think it will be so nice to have a company in this vast universe! Somehow we always feel that aliens would be always bad to humans, there might be good aliens also somewhere who might help us in solving our current diseases/share advance knowledge or even give us new resources!