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Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

126 points by likeaj6 9y ago

nicolashahn 9y ago
The article mentions Max Tegmark; if you thought this content was interesting I highly recommend reading Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe. A totally mind expanding read.
- drb91 9y ago
  It is the most satisfying GUT I have seen described, even if it isn’t rigorous, formal, etc. It simply satisfies my inner voice saying “the feeling that we are special in any way is wrong”. Naturally, that’s only true for a very emotional level of special :) but so far, I’m happy with just the specialness of being a massively complex life form.
kldavis4 9y ago
Many worlds hypothesis is the atheistic solution to the observation that our universe appears to be tuned for life.
- rocqua 9y ago
  Doesn't that break down due to a total measurement bias? That is, if the universe were not tuned for life, there would be no-one around to wonder why that is the case.
  - kldavis4 9y ago
    Isn't that just the anthropic principle? That's another explanation for a life friendly universe, but not something that can be proved or taken as proof.
    - state_less 9y ago
      But you wouldn't post such things on another day, on another thread, on a topic unrelated. Hacker news and the commenters here are not gods finely tuning comments.
- DoubleCribble 9y ago
  Not so long ago, it was scientific dogma that all life on this planet was dependent upon photosynthesis. Then some oceanographer types sent some cameras down to the sea floor to look at some hydrothermal vents and... there went that idea! Is our universe tuned for life or is life tuned to its universe?
  - kldavis4 9y ago
    That would be a great comparison if the many worlds hypothesis were proven or even provable. As it stands, it is basically just a belief which is held to explain the scientific facts. Not much different from ancient man's belief that spirits had influence over the weather cycle. Check out https://strangenotions.com/flew/ https://strangenotions.com/flew/
    - simonh 9y ago
      Many worlds is an interpretation of quantum uncertainly, but what we seem to be talking about here are multiverse theories. One of these, M-Theory is an extension of string theory and is the only theory known to elegantly unify quantum mechanics with general relativity's gravitational force in a mathematically consistent way. It’s not supported by experimental evidence yet, but I’d hardly characterise it as no different from belief in spirits.
      - kldavis4 9y ago
        Actually, I _am_ referring to 'many worlds' (at least according to the technical explanation in this article: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/26/are-many-worlds-and-the-multiverse-the-same-idea/#.WqxexpPwbh8 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/26/...) and not a multiverse. And yes, there is some hope that there will be some testable empirical evidence at some point, but if in the end it turns out that there are not 'many worlds', then I don't see that big a difference. I'd love it if there were parallel dimensions but it is fantasy at this point.
        9y ago
- jpm_sd 9y ago
  "This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' " -- Douglas Adams
  - vivekd 9y ago
    To be fair it's not the same thing at all - because the whole point of the article is that by all accounts we shouldn't fit into the hole we're in, we should have been wiped out of our hole long we even had a chance to evolve by comets, asteroids, ice ages, volcanic events or a multitude of other phenomena poised to end life as we know it. That's really what the article is about; sort of a 'humanity, it's improbable that you managed to evolve at all'
- bobthechef 9y ago
  Sure, that's the motivation some atheists have in believing or at least entertaining the idea of a multiverse, but ultimately, it does relatively little to advance atheism, and not just because of its intractability. Fine tuning is an interesting thing to ponder, and certainly a single universe that is finely tuned could lend some support to divine intent, but the real arguments for the existence of God do not hinge on fine tuning or probabilities or any of the standard fare of young earth creationists and the like that philistines like Dawkins enjoy dumping on. The best arguments demonstrate God's existence as a necessary fact following from evident premises. (Btw, Edward Feser has recently publishes a book, "Five Proofs of the Existence of God", on the subject, selecting five that he holds to be particularly important.)
  - kldavis4 9y ago
    Thanks for the reply. Feser's looks interesting - going to check it out.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
  Yeah, although I wouldn't say that has much bearing on whether or not it's true. I think everyone is tempted to accept theories that justify the world view he/she hopes is true.
sgt101 9y ago
Once I dreamed that I lived through a nuclear war, I dreamed the aftermath and my life scraping and scrapping through a shredded world. The dream brought me to the house in the woods where I live now, but in that world it was tattered and burned and no children lived there. I laid down, grateful for a dry spot and a wall that split the wind. I woke here, but not there.
natch 9y ago
It brings to mind the sentient mud puddle. If a mud puddle were sentient, it might marvel at how the mud around it was so perfectly shaped so as to exactly match the shape of the water the puddle was made up of. Amazing. Unbelievable. Couldn't be a coincidence, that there's such a perfect fit. What are the chances that this unique shape of the water outline would be matched exactly by the shape of the mud around it. A true miracle, it might think. Unless the sentient puddle gave the matter just one more moment's thought, in which case it might conclude that the water and the shape of the mud around it matched for no reason other than that the water flowed to fit the mud.
- yters 9y ago
  The anthropic principle doesn't make our universe any less surprising. It's like saying "of course I survived that catastrophic accident, otherwise I wouldn't be observing the fact I survived the accident."
  - baddox 9y ago
    The difference is that we have a decent amount of information on the number of catastrophic accidents that occur and the number of people who survive them. Since that number is known to be low, there’s nothing unsurprising about your own survival of such an accident. But we don’t know the number of times life has emerged in the universe, except that it is at least 1. Every intelligent life form we are aware of are one “survivor,” but we knew very little about the number of total survivors in the universe. Thus it is a little odd for us to claim that our “survival” is surprising.
    - zamalek 9y ago
      There's this analogy. It's a bridge representing species progress. If you fall off of it, you are extinct. All life that we know of has fallen off and it is certain that we will too. AI is impressive in this scenario because it exists outside of nature, it might fall "upwards" (towards immortality). This is why I am a proponent of SAI; I would let SAI out of the box. In the larger scheme of things, humans will go extinct, but there is an ever so slight chance that SAI would take pity and take us with to immortality. However infinitesimally possible, it is more possible than impossible that it will take us with it. Roll the dice. You can't win the lottery if you don't enter it. If it wipes us out, then that is merely the pre-emptive inevitability.
lopmotr 9y ago
I didn't get through the whole thing, but if there are big meteor impacts, wouldn't we see them on other planets in the solar system? They mention Hale-Bop for instance. Surely we can work out a probability distribution from the evidence we have besides Earth.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  The two largest impact craters we know of are on the Moon and Mars, and those happened about four billion years ago. Of course we'll never know for the gas giants. Not doing the math, but this makes the odds seem pretty low after the initial "flurry" of our solar system's birth, barring Jupiter perturbing an existing asteroid into a collision into earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_craters_in_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_craters_in_the...
8bitsrule 9y ago
Kind of ironic to think that humans survived a million-year ice age, then might be destroyed by some fool with a button. If 'our universe' is 'tuned for life', it certainly isn't specifically tuned for human life (e.g. plague, volcanos). Nature offers us no guarantees. Unless we stay in tune with that accord, we will be removed.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Aren't homo sapiens here only because an asteroid strike around 70 million years ago caused a culling that killed the dinosaurs and sort of reset life to favor small mammals over the dinosaurs? If perhaps that had not hit the earth, we would not be here and something that evolved from dinosaurs would be the top of the food chain and typing comments here! We had to get that one strike in at the right time (from our perspective) and then not another semi-apocalyptic event to get to here.
dougdonohoe 9y ago
I can't help but think of what the 17 families in Parkland, Florida would think of this article. Especially this quote: “This is a defense against instantaneous, violent death, which you will find was avoided, but anything that sort of maims or injures or mangles you or whatever is still fair game.”
- burnte 9y ago
  On the macro scale, he's right. On the human scale, however, your number could be up any second. When I get into debates with people about security and the erosion of rights under the guise of security, I'll eventually say, "You can only be so safe. In the end a determined killer WILL kill someone, even if it's only by biting them to death. There WILL be successful terror attacks. There WILL be random attacks of violence, the question is, how much freedom do I want to lose before I realize that there will always be danger in the world?" That makes people feel I'm a nihilist or something, but it's the truth. I enjoy living, I Want safety for people, but we can't wrap the world in Nerf. Life is a trap no one gets out of alive. If you're alive today, you're lucky nothing killed you along the way, enjoy it while you can. With stuff like the Florida school shooting, we should absolutely do something about guns and gun culture because it's needlessly killing kids. But making me take off y belt at the airport isn't saving anyone, or worse, saying the TSA /customs/the gov't in general should have the right to my passwords to get into my computer because "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide" is absolutely terrifying and wrong.
- lopmotr 9y ago
  Presumably they'll agree if they're being rational since it perfectly fits the situation. They may have emotional injuries but not instantaneous death. Don't forget also, that dying in a bridge collapse is just as bad as dying in a common car crash, which happens every single day in America. Those non-newsworthy people have families too.
baking 9y ago
I think this provides a new answer to the "Great Filter" question. Is it before us or after us? The answer is both.
mrsparks85 9y ago
"It could be that we’ve been shielded from these existential threats by our very existence." Lots of misleading casualty statements like this in the article. Still enjoyed it.
bsenftner 9y ago
Great mind fuck.
digitalantfarm 9y ago
That's the stuff of nightmares right there.
- russdill 9y ago
  Kinda bums me out that with data on so many galaxies, we see absolutely zero evidence so far for any galaxy wide effects from intelligent life. It seems likely that intelligent life arising in a single galaxy is rare, and that it's almost certain we are the only intelligent species in our own.
seiferteric 9y ago
What a great trippy article... most pop-sci articles are not worth reading, but this one really held my attention the whole time. Even though I have heard of a lot of these ideas before, I never heard them put together in this way, like your consciousness is a thread in the multiverse constantly avoiding destruction! I always thought if the multiworlds thing was true, it would be like each person living their lives unaware of the others... but maybe not. Pretty weird to think about and probably we will never know... All though if I end up living to 1000+ years old, maybe I will become convinced.
roywiggins 9y ago
This is a good way to solve problems in NP. First, guess an answer uniformly at random. Check if it's correct (in polynomial time). If it isn't, blow up the planet. Conditioned on surviving, you also have solved the NP problem in polynomial time. You can also use a world-ending device to prove that this reasoning works. Blow up the world with probability .99999999999. Conditioned on surviving, you will then be nearly certain that quantum hell is real- more certain than about nearly any other physical theory. The other problem is that depending on how you count, almost all observers are actually hallucinating Boltzmann brains. There are duplicates of us, but there are arguably even more pocket universes with hallucinating brains that just very briefly remember being something like us and then die. So that's not very reassuring.
tmills 9y ago
Trippy article. Wikipedia, as always, is a good place for a deeper dive into this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
mikeytown2 9y ago
Makes me think about the Fermi paradox [1] and Great Filters [2]. But for all we know the universe could be full of life at chimpanzee intelligence; no way to know unless we send probes [3] or seriously up our telescopes [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft)
- natecavanaugh 9y ago
  This is one is my favorite comments of all time, simply because while I was familiar with the Fermi Paradox, the rest of the links were new and unexpected. Thank you!
  - eulo__ 9y ago
    Learning about the great filter can cause depression, reader beware.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      Compared with the apparent impossibility of life being created from nothing, I just can not understand why people insist so much that the Great Filter is in the future, instead of the past.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  The Fermi paradox is unlikely to be answered by something making it very unlikely for our chimp level ancestors jumping to human level. The number of Homo species on the planet that co-evolved to human level intelligence suggests this is not extremely difficult. What is a huge filter is the requirement of a stable climate over million of years. The key to this is the Moon which keeps the Earth's axis of rotation from wandering over a wide angle on geological timescales. The Moon is so large and unlikely (we still don't have a good theory for how it was formed and captured by the Earth) that this alone could explain the lack of other intelligent life in the visible universe.
ideonexus 9y ago
This principle is also why creationists don't understand how the world around us seems so engineered for us. That's because it was engineered... by our ancestors. The peach is a great example of this. Peaches didn't exist 3,000 years ago, but were engineered from a bitter, mostly-pit fruit through artificial selection into what we enjoy today. The same is true of corn, tomatoes, lettuce, cows, chickens, and so many other agricultural products. These things never existed in nature, we engineered them, but we just see the end result. A fascinating aspect of this I learned about recently was the importance of fire to human development. I always imagined this tool in the context of humans huddled around a campfire for warmth and cooking, but our ancestors actually applied it on a much more epic scale. They burned down entire forests to create open fields where predators couldn't hide and where they could forage for well-cooked critters amid the ashes. Everywhere we migrated, we geoengineered forests into savannas.

126 points by likeaj6 9y ago

The article mentions Max Tegmark; if you thought this content was interesting I highly recommend reading Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe. A totally mind expanding read.

drb91 9y ago
It is the most satisfying GUT I have seen described, even if it isn’t rigorous, formal, etc. It simply satisfies my inner voice saying “the feeling that we are special in any way is wrong”. Naturally, that’s only true for a very emotional level of special :) but so far, I’m happy with just the specialness of being a massively complex life form.

kldavis4 9y ago

Many worlds hypothesis is the atheistic solution to the observation that our universe appears to be tuned for life.

rocqua 9y ago
Doesn't that break down due to a total measurement bias? That is, if the universe were not tuned for life, there would be no-one around to wonder why that is the case.
- kldavis4 9y ago
  Isn't that just the anthropic principle? That's another explanation for a life friendly universe, but not something that can be proved or taken as proof.
  - state_less 9y ago
    But you wouldn't post such things on another day, on another thread, on a topic unrelated. Hacker news and the commenters here are not gods finely tuning comments.
DoubleCribble 9y ago
Not so long ago, it was scientific dogma that all life on this planet was dependent upon photosynthesis. Then some oceanographer types sent some cameras down to the sea floor to look at some hydrothermal vents and... there went that idea! Is our universe tuned for life or is life tuned to its universe?
- kldavis4 9y ago
  That would be a great comparison if the many worlds hypothesis were proven or even provable. As it stands, it is basically just a belief which is held to explain the scientific facts. Not much different from ancient man's belief that spirits had influence over the weather cycle. Check out https://strangenotions.com/flew/ https://strangenotions.com/flew/
  - simonh 9y ago
    Many worlds is an interpretation of quantum uncertainly, but what we seem to be talking about here are multiverse theories. One of these, M-Theory is an extension of string theory and is the only theory known to elegantly unify quantum mechanics with general relativity's gravitational force in a mathematically consistent way. It’s not supported by experimental evidence yet, but I’d hardly characterise it as no different from belief in spirits.
    - kldavis4 9y ago
      Actually, I _am_ referring to 'many worlds' (at least according to the technical explanation in this article: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/26/are-many-worlds-and-the-multiverse-the-same-idea/#.WqxexpPwbh8 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/26/...) and not a multiverse. And yes, there is some hope that there will be some testable empirical evidence at some point, but if in the end it turns out that there are not 'many worlds', then I don't see that big a difference. I'd love it if there were parallel dimensions but it is fantasy at this point.
      - 9y ago
jpm_sd 9y ago
"This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' " -- Douglas Adams
- vivekd 9y ago
  To be fair it's not the same thing at all - because the whole point of the article is that by all accounts we shouldn't fit into the hole we're in, we should have been wiped out of our hole long we even had a chance to evolve by comets, asteroids, ice ages, volcanic events or a multitude of other phenomena poised to end life as we know it. That's really what the article is about; sort of a 'humanity, it's improbable that you managed to evolve at all'
bobthechef 9y ago
Sure, that's the motivation some atheists have in believing or at least entertaining the idea of a multiverse, but ultimately, it does relatively little to advance atheism, and not just because of its intractability. Fine tuning is an interesting thing to ponder, and certainly a single universe that is finely tuned could lend some support to divine intent, but the real arguments for the existence of God do not hinge on fine tuning or probabilities or any of the standard fare of young earth creationists and the like that philistines like Dawkins enjoy dumping on. The best arguments demonstrate God's existence as a necessary fact following from evident premises. (Btw, Edward Feser has recently publishes a book, "Five Proofs of the Existence of God", on the subject, selecting five that he holds to be particularly important.)
- kldavis4 9y ago
  Thanks for the reply. Feser's looks interesting - going to check it out.
DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
Yeah, although I wouldn't say that has much bearing on whether or not it's true. I think everyone is tempted to accept theories that justify the world view he/she hopes is true.

sgt101 9y ago

Once I dreamed that I lived through a nuclear war, I dreamed the aftermath and my life scraping and scrapping through a shredded world. The dream brought me to the house in the woods where I live now, but in that world it was tattered and burned and no children lived there. I laid down, grateful for a dry spot and a wall that split the wind. I woke here, but not there.

natch 9y ago

It brings to mind the sentient mud puddle. If a mud puddle were sentient, it might marvel at how the mud around it was so perfectly shaped so as to exactly match the shape of the water the puddle was made up of. Amazing. Unbelievable. Couldn't be a coincidence, that there's such a perfect fit. What are the chances that this unique shape of the water outline would be matched exactly by the shape of the mud around it. A true miracle, it might think. Unless the sentient puddle gave the matter just one more moment's thought, in which case it might conclude that the water and the shape of the mud around it matched for no reason other than that the water flowed to fit the mud.

yters 9y ago
The anthropic principle doesn't make our universe any less surprising. It's like saying "of course I survived that catastrophic accident, otherwise I wouldn't be observing the fact I survived the accident."
- baddox 9y ago
  The difference is that we have a decent amount of information on the number of catastrophic accidents that occur and the number of people who survive them. Since that number is known to be low, there’s nothing unsurprising about your own survival of such an accident. But we don’t know the number of times life has emerged in the universe, except that it is at least 1. Every intelligent life form we are aware of are one “survivor,” but we knew very little about the number of total survivors in the universe. Thus it is a little odd for us to claim that our “survival” is surprising.
  - zamalek 9y ago
    There's this analogy. It's a bridge representing species progress. If you fall off of it, you are extinct. All life that we know of has fallen off and it is certain that we will too. AI is impressive in this scenario because it exists outside of nature, it might fall "upwards" (towards immortality). This is why I am a proponent of SAI; I would let SAI out of the box. In the larger scheme of things, humans will go extinct, but there is an ever so slight chance that SAI would take pity and take us with to immortality. However infinitesimally possible, it is more possible than impossible that it will take us with it. Roll the dice. You can't win the lottery if you don't enter it. If it wipes us out, then that is merely the pre-emptive inevitability.

lopmotr 9y ago

I didn't get through the whole thing, but if there are big meteor impacts, wouldn't we see them on other planets in the solar system? They mention Hale-Bop for instance. Surely we can work out a probability distribution from the evidence we have besides Earth.

stevenwoo 9y ago
The two largest impact craters we know of are on the Moon and Mars, and those happened about four billion years ago. Of course we'll never know for the gas giants. Not doing the math, but this makes the odds seem pretty low after the initial "flurry" of our solar system's birth, barring Jupiter perturbing an existing asteroid into a collision into earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_craters_in_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_craters_in_the...

8bitsrule 9y ago

Kind of ironic to think that humans survived a million-year ice age, then might be destroyed by some fool with a button. If 'our universe' is 'tuned for life', it certainly isn't specifically tuned for human life (e.g. plague, volcanos). Nature offers us no guarantees. Unless we stay in tune with that accord, we will be removed.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
stevenwoo 9y ago
Aren't homo sapiens here only because an asteroid strike around 70 million years ago caused a culling that killed the dinosaurs and sort of reset life to favor small mammals over the dinosaurs? If perhaps that had not hit the earth, we would not be here and something that evolved from dinosaurs would be the top of the food chain and typing comments here! We had to get that one strike in at the right time (from our perspective) and then not another semi-apocalyptic event to get to here.

dougdonohoe 9y ago

I can't help but think of what the 17 families in Parkland, Florida would think of this article. Especially this quote: “This is a defense against instantaneous, violent death, which you will find was avoided, but anything that sort of maims or injures or mangles you or whatever is still fair game.”

burnte 9y ago
On the macro scale, he's right. On the human scale, however, your number could be up any second. When I get into debates with people about security and the erosion of rights under the guise of security, I'll eventually say, "You can only be so safe. In the end a determined killer WILL kill someone, even if it's only by biting them to death. There WILL be successful terror attacks. There WILL be random attacks of violence, the question is, how much freedom do I want to lose before I realize that there will always be danger in the world?" That makes people feel I'm a nihilist or something, but it's the truth. I enjoy living, I Want safety for people, but we can't wrap the world in Nerf. Life is a trap no one gets out of alive. If you're alive today, you're lucky nothing killed you along the way, enjoy it while you can. With stuff like the Florida school shooting, we should absolutely do something about guns and gun culture because it's needlessly killing kids. But making me take off y belt at the airport isn't saving anyone, or worse, saying the TSA /customs/the gov't in general should have the right to my passwords to get into my computer because "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide" is absolutely terrifying and wrong.
lopmotr 9y ago
Presumably they'll agree if they're being rational since it perfectly fits the situation. They may have emotional injuries but not instantaneous death. Don't forget also, that dying in a bridge collapse is just as bad as dying in a common car crash, which happens every single day in America. Those non-newsworthy people have families too.

baking 9y ago

I think this provides a new answer to the "Great Filter" question. Is it before us or after us? The answer is both.

mrsparks85 9y ago

"It could be that we’ve been shielded from these existential threats by our very existence." Lots of misleading casualty statements like this in the article. Still enjoyed it.

bsenftner 9y ago

Great mind fuck.

digitalantfarm 9y ago

That's the stuff of nightmares right there.

russdill 9y ago
Kinda bums me out that with data on so many galaxies, we see absolutely zero evidence so far for any galaxy wide effects from intelligent life. It seems likely that intelligent life arising in a single galaxy is rare, and that it's almost certain we are the only intelligent species in our own.

seiferteric 9y ago

What a great trippy article... most pop-sci articles are not worth reading, but this one really held my attention the whole time. Even though I have heard of a lot of these ideas before, I never heard them put together in this way, like your consciousness is a thread in the multiverse constantly avoiding destruction! I always thought if the multiworlds thing was true, it would be like each person living their lives unaware of the others... but maybe not. Pretty weird to think about and probably we will never know... All though if I end up living to 1000+ years old, maybe I will become convinced.

roywiggins 9y ago

This is a good way to solve problems in NP. First, guess an answer uniformly at random. Check if it's correct (in polynomial time). If it isn't, blow up the planet. Conditioned on surviving, you also have solved the NP problem in polynomial time. You can also use a world-ending device to prove that this reasoning works. Blow up the world with probability .99999999999. Conditioned on surviving, you will then be nearly certain that quantum hell is real- more certain than about nearly any other physical theory. The other problem is that depending on how you count, almost all observers are actually hallucinating Boltzmann brains. There are duplicates of us, but there are arguably even more pocket universes with hallucinating brains that just very briefly remember being something like us and then die. So that's not very reassuring.

tmills 9y ago

Trippy article. Wikipedia, as always, is a good place for a deeper dive into this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

mikeytown2 9y ago

Makes me think about the Fermi paradox [1] and Great Filters [2]. But for all we know the universe could be full of life at chimpanzee intelligence; no way to know unless we send probes [3] or seriously up our telescopes [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft)

natecavanaugh 9y ago
This is one is my favorite comments of all time, simply because while I was familiar with the Fermi Paradox, the rest of the links were new and unexpected. Thank you!
- eulo__ 9y ago
  Learning about the great filter can cause depression, reader beware.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    Compared with the apparent impossibility of life being created from nothing, I just can not understand why people insist so much that the Great Filter is in the future, instead of the past.
danieltillett 9y ago
The Fermi paradox is unlikely to be answered by something making it very unlikely for our chimp level ancestors jumping to human level. The number of Homo species on the planet that co-evolved to human level intelligence suggests this is not extremely difficult. What is a huge filter is the requirement of a stable climate over million of years. The key to this is the Moon which keeps the Earth's axis of rotation from wandering over a wide angle on geological timescales. The Moon is so large and unlikely (we still don't have a good theory for how it was formed and captured by the Earth) that this alone could explain the lack of other intelligent life in the visible universe.

ideonexus 9y ago

This principle is also why creationists don't understand how the world around us seems so engineered for us. That's because it was engineered... by our ancestors. The peach is a great example of this. Peaches didn't exist 3,000 years ago, but were engineered from a bitter, mostly-pit fruit through artificial selection into what we enjoy today. The same is true of corn, tomatoes, lettuce, cows, chickens, and so many other agricultural products. These things never existed in nature, we engineered them, but we just see the end result. A fascinating aspect of this I learned about recently was the importance of fire to human development. I always imagined this tool in the context of humans huddled around a campfire for warmth and cooking, but our ancestors actually applied it on a much more epic scale. They burned down entire forests to create open fields where predators couldn't hide and where they could forage for well-cooked critters amid the ashes. Everywhere we migrated, we geoengineered forests into savannas.