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Me, I think there is no life beyond Earth. > How, when given the evidence of practically infinite planets out there (considering that almost every star may hav

Me, I think there is no life beyond Earth. > How, when given the evidence of practically infinite planets out there (considering that almost every star may have at least one planet, and there are even rogue planets [0] that don't orbit any star, and that asteroids and comets or even dense nebulas could also harbor life), can we even consider the possibility that this is the only planet with life? Who gives a shit? If our spaceships landed on a distant planet populated by a vast hyper-intelligent civilization of decidedly not-alive robots, would we shrug, say "no life here," and head home bored? Maybe life isn't what we're looking for? Maybe chemistry is not so poor that it has to repeat itself by re-creating something that we would consider to be alive. Maybe the non-living things are vastly more interesting. Maybe finding distant life is like visiting a distant country and finding a McDonalds. Maybe "let's find life" is just a failure of imagination. It's SETI, not SETL.

laumars 9y ago
One could flip your argument and say defining life as purely organic is a failure of imagination. The thing about searching for "life" over "intelligence" is that life doesn't necessarily need to be intelligent for it to be interesting. I also think the SETI example you've made is a tad unfair because their process dictates that their search be for intelligence (crudely put, radio transmissions). Whereas when you're visiting a planet, you can observe a wider scope of life as it need not be intelligent (as we can perceive anyway) for markers to be identified.
- deleted 9y ago
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- millstone 9y ago
  > One could flip your argument and say defining life as purely organic is a failure of imagination. That's right! So how would you define life? Or the meta-question, why bother? We gain nothing from figuring out what's "alive" and what has "merely" a rich complexity. "Search for life" is a category error. > The thing about searching for "life" over "intelligence" is that life doesn't necessarily need to be intelligent for it to be interesting. If something is interesting, why do we care if it's "life?" Anything we find is likely to operate on some scale vastly different than what we're familiar with. We won't even agree on whether it's alive. > Whereas when you're visiting a planet, you can observe a wider scope of life as it need not be intelligent (as we can perceive anyway) for markers to be identified. My hope is we'll find markers that are clearly weird and that aren't evidence of life but maybe something more and weirder that we don't understand. Isn't that even more interesting? Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > Isn't that even more interesting? Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible? We know it's possible, but we've also seen it happen only once. The observational data we have suggests the universe is mostly dead - that is, not complex. Or, in other words, boring. Discovery of any complex process on a comparable level to even simplest of what we call life would be a civilization-changing breakthrough. It would prove the universe is not boring. (It would also ultimately kill off most of our existing religions.)
    - lucozade 9y ago
      > It would also ultimately kill off most of our existing religions I think you may be underestimating the tenacity of religions
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Maybe. But I would love to see how mainstream religions of today try to handle a definitive proof of a separate tree of life elsewhere in space.
        lucozade 9y ago
        I'm going to guess they'll handle it the same way as they handled definitive proof that the Earth is more than a few thousand years old, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, evolution by natural selection etc etc. Unconditional belief in the unknowable gives you an awful lot of wiggle room when it comes to evidence.
    - bluGill 9y ago
      Most existing religions are silent on the subject of life elsewhere. Since they do not say "it doesn't exist" finding life doesn't mean anything (it might even grow as they have a new group of life to convert). Religion tends to be very careful to stay in the area of not providing a testable hypothesis which means that new alien knowledge won't prove it wrong.
Razengan 9y ago
> If our spaceships landed on a distant planet populated by a vast hyper-intelligent civilization of decidedly not-alive robots, would we shrug, say "no life here," and head home bored? As a different take on that: Suppose we develop "robots" that can sustain themselves, mine resources, produce [ever improving] copies of themselves, and learn on their own and teach each other. Then we send them to colonize a distant planet. Fast forward a hundred years. Those robots now have a "civilization" of their own. By what criteria would that civilization fail to be counted as "life" by an species looking for such?

laumars 9y ago

One could flip your argument and say defining life as purely organic is a failure of imagination. The thing about searching for "life" over "intelligence" is that life doesn't necessarily need to be intelligent for it to be interesting. I also think the SETI example you've made is a tad unfair because their process dictates that their search be for intelligence (crudely put, radio transmissions). Whereas when you're visiting a planet, you can observe a wider scope of life as it need not be intelligent (as we can perceive anyway) for markers to be identified.

deleted 9y ago
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millstone 9y ago
> One could flip your argument and say defining life as purely organic is a failure of imagination. That's right! So how would you define life? Or the meta-question, why bother? We gain nothing from figuring out what's "alive" and what has "merely" a rich complexity. "Search for life" is a category error. > The thing about searching for "life" over "intelligence" is that life doesn't necessarily need to be intelligent for it to be interesting. If something is interesting, why do we care if it's "life?" Anything we find is likely to operate on some scale vastly different than what we're familiar with. We won't even agree on whether it's alive. > Whereas when you're visiting a planet, you can observe a wider scope of life as it need not be intelligent (as we can perceive anyway) for markers to be identified. My hope is we'll find markers that are clearly weird and that aren't evidence of life but maybe something more and weirder that we don't understand. Isn't that even more interesting? Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Isn't that even more interesting? Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible? We know it's possible, but we've also seen it happen only once. The observational data we have suggests the universe is mostly dead - that is, not complex. Or, in other words, boring. Discovery of any complex process on a comparable level to even simplest of what we call life would be a civilization-changing breakthrough. It would prove the universe is not boring. (It would also ultimately kill off most of our existing religions.)
  - lucozade 9y ago
    > It would also ultimately kill off most of our existing religions I think you may be underestimating the tenacity of religions
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Maybe. But I would love to see how mainstream religions of today try to handle a definitive proof of a separate tree of life elsewhere in space.
      - lucozade 9y ago
        I'm going to guess they'll handle it the same way as they handled definitive proof that the Earth is more than a few thousand years old, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, evolution by natural selection etc etc. Unconditional belief in the unknowable gives you an awful lot of wiggle room when it comes to evidence.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    Most existing religions are silent on the subject of life elsewhere. Since they do not say "it doesn't exist" finding life doesn't mean anything (it might even grow as they have a new group of life to convert). Religion tends to be very careful to stay in the area of not providing a testable hypothesis which means that new alien knowledge won't prove it wrong.

Razengan 9y ago

> If our spaceships landed on a distant planet populated by a vast hyper-intelligent civilization of decidedly not-alive robots, would we shrug, say "no life here," and head home bored? As a different take on that: Suppose we develop "robots" that can sustain themselves, mine resources, produce [ever improving] copies of themselves, and learn on their own and teach each other. Then we send them to colonize a distant planet. Fast forward a hundred years. Those robots now have a "civilization" of their own. By what criteria would that civilization fail to be counted as "life" by an species looking for such?