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> 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-que

> 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.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Christianity, at least as far as I have been taught it, seems to implicitly conflict with intelligent extraterrestrial life, as at the very least it would lead to questions whether the aliens also are in sin, whether Christ's sacrifice applies to them or did they have their own equivalent of Jesus, and generally how special humans are in God's grand cosmic plan. > 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. That's true, but until very recently, the idea of life elsewhere wasn't really considered seriously.
  - laumars 9y ago
    It depends on the preacher. Some are more traditional eg arguing that Earth is unique for hosting life because God created the Earth and that the universe is just there to demonstrate the epic scale of God's power. Source: I'm not religious but I've been dragged to plenty of sermons by the extended family.
laumars 9y ago
> 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. To be honest I think you're over thinking the whole "life" thing. It's just a label. You could replace that term and still have the same arguments. eg "What would someone define as 'interesting'? What does that category even mean?". Or "complex", or "intelligent" or any other label. > Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible? Possible, yeah. But it's unique in that we are constantly finding a multitude of other phenomena in the universe yet we've only ever observed life on our own planet. That alone makes this topic interesting in my opinion. I don't see why it has to be an either / or though. Nobody is suggesting we search for life at the sacrifice of learning more about black holes...or whatever.
bluGill 9y ago
Geology is interesting I will grant that. However if you subtract life earth is much less interesting. All the rocks you can find on earth can be found on other plants in our solar system. You can go most places on earth examine all the rocks and say for each "very similar to some other rock from elsewhere". But the life in each place will be very different. This is not to subtract from geology which is an interesting and useful study, just to say it is unlikely we would discover anything very new if we could somehow examine every planet in the universe. However if we add in life we would expect a lot of interesting variety to study.

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.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Christianity, at least as far as I have been taught it, seems to implicitly conflict with intelligent extraterrestrial life, as at the very least it would lead to questions whether the aliens also are in sin, whether Christ's sacrifice applies to them or did they have their own equivalent of Jesus, and generally how special humans are in God's grand cosmic plan. > 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. That's true, but until very recently, the idea of life elsewhere wasn't really considered seriously.
- laumars 9y ago
  It depends on the preacher. Some are more traditional eg arguing that Earth is unique for hosting life because God created the Earth and that the universe is just there to demonstrate the epic scale of God's power. Source: I'm not religious but I've been dragged to plenty of sermons by the extended family.

laumars 9y ago

> 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. To be honest I think you're over thinking the whole "life" thing. It's just a label. You could replace that term and still have the same arguments. eg "What would someone define as 'interesting'? What does that category even mean?". Or "complex", or "intelligent" or any other label. > Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible? Possible, yeah. But it's unique in that we are constantly finding a multitude of other phenomena in the universe yet we've only ever observed life on our own planet. That alone makes this topic interesting in my opinion. I don't see why it has to be an either / or though. Nobody is suggesting we search for life at the sacrifice of learning more about black holes...or whatever.

bluGill 9y ago

Geology is interesting I will grant that. However if you subtract life earth is much less interesting. All the rocks you can find on earth can be found on other plants in our solar system. You can go most places on earth examine all the rocks and say for each "very similar to some other rock from elsewhere". But the life in each place will be very different. This is not to subtract from geology which is an interesting and useful study, just to say it is unlikely we would discover anything very new if we could somehow examine every planet in the universe. However if we add in life we would expect a lot of interesting variety to study.