9 ms·

If alien life were discovered within our solar system, I wonder what the implications for the Drake Equation would be. Assuming panspermia is ruled out, the fac

by drewrv 9y ago

If alien life were discovered within our solar system, I wonder what the implications for the Drake Equation would be. Assuming panspermia is ruled out, the fact that abiogenesis occured twice within a seemingly ordinary system would imply life is incredibly common.

delecti 9y ago
Well one factor would go up (planets with life 1>2) and another would go down (planets with life developing intelligence 1>0.5), resulting in a wash. It does move towards giving additional degrees of freedom on those terms though, making the equation as a whole slightly less pseudo-science.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Depends on their intelligence if we find them, right? They might be intelligent and tool-using, but hampered by their aquatic origins.
  - delecti 9y ago
    The relevant terms (paraphrased) are: number that can have life, percent of those which do have life, percent of those which have intelligent life, percent of those that release signals into space. So that would just move the same math down one more step. Twice the number of planets which have life (whether you adjust "can have life" or just the percent of the above which do), but that cancels out with half as many either being intelligent or releasing signals.
    - Density 9y ago
      Intelligent and releasing within our immediate galactic vicinity. I don't understand why the aliens would waste power beaming directed and powerful signals into space. Do you think the BBC bothers broadcasting enough signal for the Martians to listen to their radio? I don't think that's a very profitable business model.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    To a fish, we're aliens. It must be terrifying.
    - bdamm 9y ago
      I get the comparison, but personally I think it only works if we found tool-using behavior in aquatic species that shows they are actively modifying their environment to improve their survivability, so that they can have some meaningful basis for judging us as like them. Such as dolphins using agriculture. Otherwise we're just part of the freak show up where there is more light and less pressure.
      - deadmetheny 9y ago
        Octopuses have been observed using tools, and we're very quickly determining that they are extremely intelligent. If they had longer lifespans and weren't solitary, who knows what they may have become.
        Asooka 9y ago
        Given that they breed fast, I'm a bit surprised nobody has tried to breed sociable octopuses.
        piercebot 9y ago
        https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-observed-180964936/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
        robotbikes 9y ago
        I think there have been a few instances where they found enough octopi clustered that they were shown to be sociable. This article is about the Octopi cities https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-observed-180964936/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
  - bochoh 9y ago
    Is is intriguing to me to consider the limitations of space travel if you were an aquatic organism. Simply moving that much of any fluid versus empty "air" space would make leaving your planet that much more difficult. That's not to mention the inherent issues of electricity and developing circuits underwater.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      Underwater technological civilization isn’t possible, tool making is very limited, no fire, no complex chemistry, no real evolutionary path to a technological advance society without uplifting. While possibly there aren’t that many restrictions on where life can evolve and even where can different levels of intelligence can evolve there are likely quite a bit of restrictions on where and how technological intelligence can evolve. Which puts some restrictions or bias towards both biological/evolutionary traits and as well as environmental ones. While I think we’ll find life in very strange places eventually and life that will be very strange any technological species we might encounter would be something much more similar to us than to anything else.
      - debatem1 9y ago
        Why are you confident that underwater technical civilization isn't possible? It would seem to me that techniques like hydraulics would emerge quickly, and large pressure and temperature differentials over small distances are considerably more common and easier to harness underwater than above. Fabrication is certainly harder, but not impossibly so. Some weapons like thrusting spears might be easier to make and more advantageous in the water than on land, and those developed pretty early for us.
        dogma1138 9y ago
        Because show me an evolutionary path into fine tool making and complex chemistry. Chemistry is virtually impossible underwater, were not talking about an octopus using a stick even some birds use tools that's not exactly what we would call a technological intelligence. No fire, no smelting no metalworking, no complex materials.
  - nerfhammer 9y ago
    Basically. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years. If the asteroid had never hit the Earth, maybe they still would. The earth is probably only inhabitable for another billion years or so and has been inhabitable for 4 billion years, so we're 80% of the way through the Earth's habitable life. Maybe it's not atypical that life-bearing planets don't end up producing a technologically advanced one. The Earth is an example of how a planet can have complex animal life for hundreds of millions of years without any of them being able to invent cake, and habitability is relatively temporary.
- losteric 9y ago
  The known probabilities will go down, but that evidence is very weak with a sample size of < 1 solar system. Personally, I've always assumed less than 100% of life-bearing planets will have intelligent life. Earth would have failed less than 1M years ago, and our species may not be around for long. The interesting question, to me, is how often does life arise? If we find two origins in our solar system... that would change everything.
  - delecti 9y ago
    I suspect that life will occur pretty much everywhere it can. It seemed to have popped up about as early as it could have on our planet, and has adapted to just about every nook and cranny here. And I agree that intelligence is unlikely to be as ubiquitous as life is. It takes an awful lot of resources to grow brains as big as ours, and it's probably just not worth it most of the time.
    - losteric 9y ago
      I can't clearly describe this thought yet, but I believe life depends on an environment with many channels for releasing small amounts of entropy (and protection from destructive high energy levels). That's all we are, self-regulating reproducing entropy machines. Once life exists, it diversifies into every energy niche. Earth has an incredibly complex entropic ecosystem - sunlight, wind, rain/flowing water, lightning, tectonic plates recycling material, radioactive material, and lots of interesting molecules... it seems inevitable that life would evolve. The Moon? Solar radiation, and maybe some chemical reactions driven by solar radiation. No life. Mercury? Too much solar radiation, destroys anything depending on small energy deltas. Mars? Above-average entropy channels in the past, but it's pretty dead now
- drewrv 9y ago
  It would only be a wash if you currently believe the chance of developing intelligence is > 50%. To me, the fact that intelligence is rare on earth makes me think the odds of developing intelligence elsewhere is rare too.
  - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
    Depends on what you mean by Intelligence. We see tool use in many species, yet none of them are sending space ships. Maybe we should include an "industrialization" or "super-organization" to the criteria of aliens we'd want to trade with.
    - XorNot 9y ago
      Makes a lot of assumptions that multiple technological societies can survive the early competitive period too ( the one we're pretty obviously still in)
  - njharman 9y ago
    How do you conclude that intelligence is rare on earth?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Aren't we discovering that our solar system isn't very "ordinary" at all after detecting that most of the systems with extra-solar planets are very different from us?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  How do you figure? Are you thinking of the fact that most discovered planets are gas giants? This is due to the sensitivity of our equipment moreso than an insight about the distribution of planets in the universe.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I think you're right about that.
- svachalek 9y ago
  Do you have references on that? I was under the impression that as our detection improved, the systems we found around stars like ours were starting to look increasingly like ours. (But, at the same time it's looking like smaller, colder stars may have the bulk of inhabitable planets.)
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    This articles concludes that we are average, but I don't really understand how - we're only average in age, but we differ in just about every other data point (no super earths, low-eccentricity orbits, no close-in planets): http://aasnova.org/2015/09/25/how-normal-is-our-solar-system/ http://aasnova.org/2015/09/25/how-normal-is-our-solar-system... This article says we're definitely weirder, but points out that the detection technology matters, and we may not have the full picture yet: https://planetplanet.net/2016/07/12/exactly-how-unusual-is-our-solar-system/ https://planetplanet.net/2016/07/12/exactly-how-unusual-is-o...
    - mitchty 9y ago
      Exactly, we're weird only in that we can only detect weird planetary systems right now. The super earths, super Jupiter type systems are so common if only because that is where our light detection is best right now. Until we start getting probes out to solar systems or have some way to detect orbits of planets that aren't perpendicular to our own we won't have much of an idea how weird we truly are or aren't.
Houshalter 9y ago
Nick Bostrom says it's one of the worst discoveries we could make. Especially if the life is complex like animal life. That would greatly increase the probability that the great filter is ahead of us instead of behind us.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  Unless we find out that for some reason all life develops at more or less the same rate from the beginning of the universe. In which case our future could be very crowded. That, or the window of technological development that we can detect and are capable of recognizing as intelligent is very small. It's possible that superintelligence is all over the place, but we're unable to perceive or comprehend it, in the same way that a nematode is completely oblivious to human society. Once a society creates superintelligence, they might even "clean up" after themselves, so that traces of previous stages of their civilization aren't available for us to observe.
  - Baeocystin 9y ago
    So a cycle every 50,000 years or so?
    - m3kw9 9y ago
      Yeah like in Mass effect
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    >all life develops at more or less the same rate I don't think that's likely. Earth is billions of years old but we have just been around for a few thousand. If we an alien world had evolved just a few thousand years earlier, it could have colonized the galaxy by now. We can't possibly be synced that perfectly. All sorts of random events, like asteroid collisions, had a huge impact on the timing of our evolution. >we're unable to perceive or comprehend it That doesn't seem likely either. An advanced civilization could easily build many kinds of megastructures that would be detectable to us, like dyson spheres. I also think it's very unlikely they wouldn't interact with us. Either to help us if they were moral, or to exterminate us if they were not.
greggarious 9y ago
It wouldn't change it much. There's a huge difference between life and intelligent life. I suspect it may be fairly common for life to occur in the forms of single celled organisms - just like extremophiles are rare but not unheard of on Earth. OTOH I suspect it's incredibly rare for complex life (insects, small mammals etc) to form.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
I don’t see how - mathematically - panspermia could ever be ruled out. Unless they’re non-organic life forms.

by drewrv 9y ago

delecti 9y ago

Well one factor would go up (planets with life 1>2) and another would go down (planets with life developing intelligence 1>0.5), resulting in a wash. It does move towards giving additional degrees of freedom on those terms though, making the equation as a whole slightly less pseudo-science.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
Depends on their intelligence if we find them, right? They might be intelligent and tool-using, but hampered by their aquatic origins.
- delecti 9y ago
  The relevant terms (paraphrased) are: number that can have life, percent of those which do have life, percent of those which have intelligent life, percent of those that release signals into space. So that would just move the same math down one more step. Twice the number of planets which have life (whether you adjust "can have life" or just the percent of the above which do), but that cancels out with half as many either being intelligent or releasing signals.
  - Density 9y ago
    Intelligent and releasing within our immediate galactic vicinity. I don't understand why the aliens would waste power beaming directed and powerful signals into space. Do you think the BBC bothers broadcasting enough signal for the Martians to listen to their radio? I don't think that's a very profitable business model.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  To a fish, we're aliens. It must be terrifying.
  - bdamm 9y ago
    I get the comparison, but personally I think it only works if we found tool-using behavior in aquatic species that shows they are actively modifying their environment to improve their survivability, so that they can have some meaningful basis for judging us as like them. Such as dolphins using agriculture. Otherwise we're just part of the freak show up where there is more light and less pressure.
    - deadmetheny 9y ago
      Octopuses have been observed using tools, and we're very quickly determining that they are extremely intelligent. If they had longer lifespans and weren't solitary, who knows what they may have become.
      - Asooka 9y ago
        Given that they breed fast, I'm a bit surprised nobody has tried to breed sociable octopuses.
        piercebot 9y ago
        https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-observed-180964936/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
        robotbikes 9y ago
        I think there have been a few instances where they found enough octopi clustered that they were shown to be sociable. This article is about the Octopi cities https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-observed-180964936/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
- bochoh 9y ago
  Is is intriguing to me to consider the limitations of space travel if you were an aquatic organism. Simply moving that much of any fluid versus empty "air" space would make leaving your planet that much more difficult. That's not to mention the inherent issues of electricity and developing circuits underwater.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Underwater technological civilization isn’t possible, tool making is very limited, no fire, no complex chemistry, no real evolutionary path to a technological advance society without uplifting. While possibly there aren’t that many restrictions on where life can evolve and even where can different levels of intelligence can evolve there are likely quite a bit of restrictions on where and how technological intelligence can evolve. Which puts some restrictions or bias towards both biological/evolutionary traits and as well as environmental ones. While I think we’ll find life in very strange places eventually and life that will be very strange any technological species we might encounter would be something much more similar to us than to anything else.
    - debatem1 9y ago
      Why are you confident that underwater technical civilization isn't possible? It would seem to me that techniques like hydraulics would emerge quickly, and large pressure and temperature differentials over small distances are considerably more common and easier to harness underwater than above. Fabrication is certainly harder, but not impossibly so. Some weapons like thrusting spears might be easier to make and more advantageous in the water than on land, and those developed pretty early for us.
      - dogma1138 9y ago
        Because show me an evolutionary path into fine tool making and complex chemistry. Chemistry is virtually impossible underwater, were not talking about an octopus using a stick even some birds use tools that's not exactly what we would call a technological intelligence. No fire, no smelting no metalworking, no complex materials.
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  Basically. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years. If the asteroid had never hit the Earth, maybe they still would. The earth is probably only inhabitable for another billion years or so and has been inhabitable for 4 billion years, so we're 80% of the way through the Earth's habitable life. Maybe it's not atypical that life-bearing planets don't end up producing a technologically advanced one. The Earth is an example of how a planet can have complex animal life for hundreds of millions of years without any of them being able to invent cake, and habitability is relatively temporary.
losteric 9y ago
The known probabilities will go down, but that evidence is very weak with a sample size of < 1 solar system. Personally, I've always assumed less than 100% of life-bearing planets will have intelligent life. Earth would have failed less than 1M years ago, and our species may not be around for long. The interesting question, to me, is how often does life arise? If we find two origins in our solar system... that would change everything.
- delecti 9y ago
  I suspect that life will occur pretty much everywhere it can. It seemed to have popped up about as early as it could have on our planet, and has adapted to just about every nook and cranny here. And I agree that intelligence is unlikely to be as ubiquitous as life is. It takes an awful lot of resources to grow brains as big as ours, and it's probably just not worth it most of the time.
  - losteric 9y ago
    I can't clearly describe this thought yet, but I believe life depends on an environment with many channels for releasing small amounts of entropy (and protection from destructive high energy levels). That's all we are, self-regulating reproducing entropy machines. Once life exists, it diversifies into every energy niche. Earth has an incredibly complex entropic ecosystem - sunlight, wind, rain/flowing water, lightning, tectonic plates recycling material, radioactive material, and lots of interesting molecules... it seems inevitable that life would evolve. The Moon? Solar radiation, and maybe some chemical reactions driven by solar radiation. No life. Mercury? Too much solar radiation, destroys anything depending on small energy deltas. Mars? Above-average entropy channels in the past, but it's pretty dead now
drewrv 9y ago
It would only be a wash if you currently believe the chance of developing intelligence is > 50%. To me, the fact that intelligence is rare on earth makes me think the odds of developing intelligence elsewhere is rare too.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  Depends on what you mean by Intelligence. We see tool use in many species, yet none of them are sending space ships. Maybe we should include an "industrialization" or "super-organization" to the criteria of aliens we'd want to trade with.
  - XorNot 9y ago
    Makes a lot of assumptions that multiple technological societies can survive the early competitive period too ( the one we're pretty obviously still in)
- njharman 9y ago
  How do you conclude that intelligence is rare on earth?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

pavel_lishin 9y ago

Aren't we discovering that our solar system isn't very "ordinary" at all after detecting that most of the systems with extra-solar planets are very different from us?

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
How do you figure? Are you thinking of the fact that most discovered planets are gas giants? This is due to the sensitivity of our equipment moreso than an insight about the distribution of planets in the universe.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I think you're right about that.
svachalek 9y ago
Do you have references on that? I was under the impression that as our detection improved, the systems we found around stars like ours were starting to look increasingly like ours. (But, at the same time it's looking like smaller, colder stars may have the bulk of inhabitable planets.)
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  This articles concludes that we are average, but I don't really understand how - we're only average in age, but we differ in just about every other data point (no super earths, low-eccentricity orbits, no close-in planets): http://aasnova.org/2015/09/25/how-normal-is-our-solar-system/ http://aasnova.org/2015/09/25/how-normal-is-our-solar-system... This article says we're definitely weirder, but points out that the detection technology matters, and we may not have the full picture yet: https://planetplanet.net/2016/07/12/exactly-how-unusual-is-our-solar-system/ https://planetplanet.net/2016/07/12/exactly-how-unusual-is-o...
  - mitchty 9y ago
    Exactly, we're weird only in that we can only detect weird planetary systems right now. The super earths, super Jupiter type systems are so common if only because that is where our light detection is best right now. Until we start getting probes out to solar systems or have some way to detect orbits of planets that aren't perpendicular to our own we won't have much of an idea how weird we truly are or aren't.

Houshalter 9y ago

Nick Bostrom says it's one of the worst discoveries we could make. Especially if the life is complex like animal life. That would greatly increase the probability that the great filter is ahead of us instead of behind us.

aalleavitch 9y ago
Unless we find out that for some reason all life develops at more or less the same rate from the beginning of the universe. In which case our future could be very crowded. That, or the window of technological development that we can detect and are capable of recognizing as intelligent is very small. It's possible that superintelligence is all over the place, but we're unable to perceive or comprehend it, in the same way that a nematode is completely oblivious to human society. Once a society creates superintelligence, they might even "clean up" after themselves, so that traces of previous stages of their civilization aren't available for us to observe.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  So a cycle every 50,000 years or so?
  - m3kw9 9y ago
    Yeah like in Mass effect
- Houshalter 9y ago
  >all life develops at more or less the same rate I don't think that's likely. Earth is billions of years old but we have just been around for a few thousand. If we an alien world had evolved just a few thousand years earlier, it could have colonized the galaxy by now. We can't possibly be synced that perfectly. All sorts of random events, like asteroid collisions, had a huge impact on the timing of our evolution. >we're unable to perceive or comprehend it That doesn't seem likely either. An advanced civilization could easily build many kinds of megastructures that would be detectable to us, like dyson spheres. I also think it's very unlikely they wouldn't interact with us. Either to help us if they were moral, or to exterminate us if they were not.

greggarious 9y ago

It wouldn't change it much. There's a huge difference between life and intelligent life. I suspect it may be fairly common for life to occur in the forms of single celled organisms - just like extremophiles are rare but not unheard of on Earth. OTOH I suspect it's incredibly rare for complex life (insects, small mammals etc) to form.

ComputerGuru 9y ago

I don’t see how - mathematically - panspermia could ever be ruled out. Unless they’re non-organic life forms.