5 ms·

>It just seems like, once it evolves, it spreads. Hence why I draw exactly the opposite conclusion. It's my thinking that if life existed throughout our 13 bil

>It just seems like, once it evolves, it spreads. Hence why I draw exactly the opposite conclusion. It's my thinking that if life existed throughout our 13 billion year old galaxy it would have evolved to saoience and consumed all available resources long before the rise of humanity. The fact our planet hasn't been strip mined or colonized is, absent hard data, good reason to believe we're alone.

roca 7y ago
There's a big difference between microbial life and intelligent life. Bostrom and others have argued that, based on how long evolutionary milestones took on Earth, the "difficult step" is actually complex multicellular life.
- Causality1 7y ago
  The timeline implies that but experimentation indicates it may not have been that hard. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39558-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39558-8 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/momentous-transition-multicellular-life-may-not-have-been-so-hard-after-all https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/momentous-transition...
  - roca 7y ago
    That's interesting. I agree with your conclusion that Fermi's paradox simply means there is no other intelligent life, though I think the jury's still out as to where the filter is.
    - Causality1 7y ago
      Indeed. There's quite a lot of debate surrounding it and a couple of mathematicians arguing we haven't hit the filter yet, but I maintain hope we're past it. It wounds my sci-fi loving heart to say this but humanity is probably better off alone.
- DoctorBit 7y ago
  An interesting discussion of that here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the...
gremlinsinc 7y ago
Why would aliens need to stripmine earth? What do we have that they need so much that isn't abundant elsewhere? There's an asteroid out there alone between Mars/Jupiter with possibly more Gold than all the gold on earth combined. Likely there are billions and trillions of these things. Advanced races probably can create just about anything from base components and minerals easy enough so they'd just need to mine whatever is nearby. Now, they could possibly need stars and galaxies (i.e. all stars in a galaxy) to capture as energy for large enterprises, but pretty sure there's not kardashev 2-3 races in our vicinity --we'd surely know it if there were. Energy is probably the only resource that aliens might go looking for, everything else is presumably abundant. I think we should really begin colonizing and expanding our biome to other planets asap so we can possibly beat other civilizations to it. I'd trust a civ that grew from our basic microbes over one from silicon -because we know how we turned out at least, we can't be so sure about them. I'd be interested to see (if I could live long enough) what would happen if we sent microbe probes to every semi-habitable planet we find, then wait 1 million years to see what life progresses from each planet.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  Did you mean to say the asteroid has more unmined gold in it than all the mined and refined gold on Earth? Because the core of the Earth likely has more mass of gold in it than all the asteroids, moons, and dwarf planets in the solar system put together. We just find that particular gold more difficult to bring to market than gold found outside our gravity well. To extra-terrestrial aliens, strip-mining would be grabbing all the loose asteroids and comets first, at the "surface", before venturing down into the deeper holes represented by the gravity wells. Stripping larger planets is metaphorically deep-shaft mining, from a space perspective.
bratbag 7y ago
I doubt sapient extraterrestrial life is going to bother with the hassle of shipping resources up from a gravity well, when those same resources are already abundantly accessible everywhere else.

roca 7y ago

There's a big difference between microbial life and intelligent life. Bostrom and others have argued that, based on how long evolutionary milestones took on Earth, the "difficult step" is actually complex multicellular life.

Causality1 7y ago
The timeline implies that but experimentation indicates it may not have been that hard. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39558-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39558-8 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/momentous-transition-multicellular-life-may-not-have-been-so-hard-after-all https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/momentous-transition...
- roca 7y ago
  That's interesting. I agree with your conclusion that Fermi's paradox simply means there is no other intelligent life, though I think the jury's still out as to where the filter is.
  - Causality1 7y ago
    Indeed. There's quite a lot of debate surrounding it and a couple of mathematicians arguing we haven't hit the filter yet, but I maintain hope we're past it. It wounds my sci-fi loving heart to say this but humanity is probably better off alone.
DoctorBit 7y ago
An interesting discussion of that here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the...

gremlinsinc 7y ago

Why would aliens need to stripmine earth? What do we have that they need so much that isn't abundant elsewhere? There's an asteroid out there alone between Mars/Jupiter with possibly more Gold than all the gold on earth combined. Likely there are billions and trillions of these things. Advanced races probably can create just about anything from base components and minerals easy enough so they'd just need to mine whatever is nearby. Now, they could possibly need stars and galaxies (i.e. all stars in a galaxy) to capture as energy for large enterprises, but pretty sure there's not kardashev 2-3 races in our vicinity --we'd surely know it if there were. Energy is probably the only resource that aliens might go looking for, everything else is presumably abundant. I think we should really begin colonizing and expanding our biome to other planets asap so we can possibly beat other civilizations to it. I'd trust a civ that grew from our basic microbes over one from silicon -because we know how we turned out at least, we can't be so sure about them. I'd be interested to see (if I could live long enough) what would happen if we sent microbe probes to every semi-habitable planet we find, then wait 1 million years to see what life progresses from each planet.

logfromblammo 7y ago
Did you mean to say the asteroid has more unmined gold in it than all the mined and refined gold on Earth? Because the core of the Earth likely has more mass of gold in it than all the asteroids, moons, and dwarf planets in the solar system put together. We just find that particular gold more difficult to bring to market than gold found outside our gravity well. To extra-terrestrial aliens, strip-mining would be grabbing all the loose asteroids and comets first, at the "surface", before venturing down into the deeper holes represented by the gravity wells. Stripping larger planets is metaphorically deep-shaft mining, from a space perspective.

bratbag 7y ago

I doubt sapient extraterrestrial life is going to bother with the hassle of shipping resources up from a gravity well, when those same resources are already abundantly accessible everywhere else.