8 ms·

I often wonder why these are always auxiliary conversations. Ever since I was young, like most kids (I have 4), I also had this deep yearning for knowledge on l

by psaux 7y ago

I often wonder why these are always auxiliary conversations. Ever since I was young, like most kids (I have 4), I also had this deep yearning for knowledge on life external to earth. Wonder why this never has gone mainstream.

AndrewKemendo 7y ago
Let's assume for a moment that we did find something resembling simple organic life on Mars and confirmed that earth isn't the only life bearing planet. What functionally changes for our existential understanding of the universe? I'd argue little to nothing. We'd learn a bit more about organic life, but no fundamental philosophical or existential questions would be resolved. Life has been confirmed to be able to thrive in many more extreme places here on earth than anywhere observed on Mars. There wouldn't be any firm resolution on the question of whether humans are the only intelligent species in the universe. I think that would be a different answer if we found inorganic life, as that would blow up the concept of organic life as singular in "life" bearing capability. I doubt we would recognize inorganic life as "life" in that case however, as humanity has a poor working definition of "life." Absent a recognizably intelligent form of life found off planet, I doubt much would change (practically or existentially) for us here on earth.
- modzu 7y ago
  what? so would we have a common ancestor with this organic life (like all life on earth shares)? id think that has philosophical and existential implications
- dleslie 7y ago
  > What functionally changes for our existential understanding of the universe? The anthropic principal becomes less compelling; to say nothing of the religious implications.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    No, because the origin of life on Mars would probably be the same event as on Earth, with life having been transferred by impact ejecta. It would not allow us to conclude that origin of life was common.
    - dleslie 7y ago
      Perhaps, or perhaps it's different enough that it most likely developed independently.
      - pfdietz 7y ago
        In which case, why haven't we seen it already on Earth? Life will have been transferred back and forth between Earth and Mars for billions of years.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Religion will have absolutely no problem to adapt to new information and incorporate it as though it had always been there. This has happened time and again in the past to the point where the religions of old would have been in direct contradiction with even the most basic scientific knowledge if they didn't adapt. The funny thing is that the so-called holy books are full of stuff that no sane human would believe in. That doesn't stop a lot of people from doing just that when those books are creatively re-interpreted by intermediaries. Religion will last for a very long time into the future, forget about major lasting change on that front other than some rearguard action to ensure survival.
    - dleslie 7y ago
      I did not intend to state the implications are the end of religion; simply that many faithful will alter their faith, in no small manner.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        I highly doubt that. If the genetics, the silicon revolution, access to space imagery, quality education, the internet and science in general did not alter faith in a drastic way I don't think 'life on Mars' is going to do anything either unless it comes in the form of little green creatures.
        dleslie 7y ago
        Curious that you don't recognize a significant shift in religious thought in the last century.
        jacquesm 7y ago
        What shift would that be? Until the 1970's or so it was getting better, since then it's gotten worse if anything. On the Christian side we have whole continents that are following some cliff notes' version of Christianity, mostly centered around money and some opportunistic politics. On the Islamic side a small group of fanatics has managed to divide the world in a way that seemed unthinkable 25 years ago and so on.
  - mindcrime 7y ago
    Nah... religious people don't depend on reason, logic, evidence, etc. They can (and will) always absorb any new discovery and incorporate it into their belief systems in such a way that it doesn't invalidate anything they already believe. Some people think Christians would have a hard time with extra-Terran life because the Bible doesn't mention any life other than the life here, and therefore any such life would arguably be free from the weight of Original Sin, yada yada yada. But I'm pretty sure if life on another planet was discovered (even intelligent life) they would just reinterpret the Biblical references that seem to refer to "Earth" as referring to "The Universe" and make "The Garden of Eden" a metaphor, and the flaming sword would become a supernova, blah, etc., yada, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, approximately 0.0% of Christians would say "Hmm... the Bible is obviously incomplete and or inaccurate, so maybe the whole thing is a load of bollocks" or whatever. And I expect it would be about the same for every other faith.
- defterGoose 7y ago
  I'd argue that the jump from 0 to 1 of "knowledge of life on other planets" would be huge. Currently, we have an almost pseudo-religious understanding of what place life holds in the universe, but that's based on the fact that when we've looked up at the cosmos for all of history, it seemed impossibly devoid of anything familiar. The discovery of life on another planet (even if that life somehow originated on Earth), turns the proposition of finding intelligent life elsewhere from at best a 50/50 question of belief into a near certainty. And that is huge.
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    >we've looked up at the cosmos for all of history, it seemed impossibly devoid of anything This is popularly misunderstood. We obviously don't see Type 3 civilizations, but if another of our own civilization was in our galaxy, we would have had an very small to extremely small chance of seeing it. I'd wager life is everywhere, and just as is the case on earth, it pays, in terms of survival, to blend in with your surroundings.
  - rgross1 7y ago
    Disagree- folks outside of the sci-fi bubble won't appreciate microbes on other planets. 0 to 1 happens when we find multicellular organisms with cognitive capabilities IMO
    - gsich 7y ago
      Doesn't really matter.
    - ksaj 7y ago
      Those come later, in the form of evolution. If we find the precursors alone, novel forms of single cell life still at that early stage, we can learn a whole lot about how multi-cellular life came about.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      "Folks outside of the sci-fi bubble" rarely appdeciate much about non-monetary impacts of space. But discovering life - even alien life - would really shake up many big religions, which tend to assume we're special, unique creations. I'm sure religions would eventually evolve to accomodate the discovery in their belief systems, but it would get noticed by regular Joes and Janes.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Presuming SpaceX pull off their plans, there will be trips to and from Mars. We'd better be pretty sure what microbes we're being exposed to or bringing back to Earth before we do. Or we might get a repeat of when the Spanish brought disease to the Inca and Maya. The mere knowledge of life is viable off-Earth is huge. If we find it on our nearest neighbour, the chances of encountering it elsewhere rise markedly. Hopefully it would trigger a search elsewhere in the solar system, like Europa.
  - lovemenot 7y ago
    >> Or we might get a repeat of when the Spanish brought disease to the Inca and Maya. Unlikely. There's been no animal hosts on Mars, in which such a micro-organism might have evolved to threaten humans on Earth. Not to say we shouldn't be careful for other reasons though. The bigger risk is the sudden extinction of entirely different branches of life, by more highly-evolved Earth-originating species.
    - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
      I think the other person is saying that Earth bacteria could potentially wipe out Martian bacteria if the conditions are right. And that would be tragic.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        That was exactly my thought. We discover extraterrestrial life, and inadvertently wipe it out, or just swamp them with an invasive species, without getting a chance to study them before we mucked up their ecosystem. As you say it would be tragic, but also very typically human.
- cabalamat 7y ago
  > What functionally changes for our existential understanding of the universe? I'd argue little to nothing. It depends on how different it is chemically form earth life. If it is similar enough that it shares a common origin, it's no big deal. If it isn't, then that's a massive deal because it means life originated twice in one solar system, therefore is probably widespread.
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    Whats the common origin of organic life again?
    - monadgonad 7y ago
      That it originated on one planet and was sent to the other by ejecta, as mentioned in the article.
      - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
        That's a hypothesis... It's still totally speculative
- joshmarlow 7y ago
  If the life evolved independently of life on earth (ie, no panspermia or anything like that), then it would have philosophical/existential implications because of the Great Filter Hypothesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. Edit for a TL;DR - The basic idea is that, if we don't see evidence of intelligent life in the universe, it must be because star traveling species must be rare. If we find life evolving twice in one solar system, then the early parts of life evolving must be relatively easy - which suggests the later parts of life becoming technologically advanced are the hard parts. In other words, life on Mars may mean that there may be more problems ahead of us than behind us.
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    If it were organic, we would not know if that life evolved independently from life on earth though. So, again finding non-intelligent organic life elsewhere doesn't answer the question of where did we come from. Simply verifying distance between two similar things isn't a sufficient variable to answer questions about distinctiveness of origin.
  - CardenB 7y ago
    Not necessarily. It just suggests the bottleneck for life lies at whatever point is after mars. Nothing would suggest that complex life gets progressively more difficult to evolve.
    - ALittleLight 7y ago
      Right now there are a few places for the great filter. To my knowledge: 1. Life 2. Multicellular life 3. Intelligent life 4. Interstellar colonization tech If you make it through all levels you should be colonizing the galaxy and detectable by us therefore. Finding life with a separate origin than ours removes one of the possible spots for the great filter and makes it significantly more likely that the great filter is ahead of us rather than behind. This is a question that will help with the survival of humanity.
- evil-olive 7y ago
  > no fundamental philosophical or existential questions would be resolved If you don't consider "does life exist on other planets?" to be a fundamental, existential question, can you share an example of what you do think is such a fundamental question? Finding life on Mars wouldn't necessarily resolve any fundamental questions, but it would open up a whole new realm of questions. Is it similar to life on Earth? How similar? Is there evidence for or against some form of panspermia? (at its most extreme, life arriving on Earth from outside the solar system, but this could also be life arising on Earth and being transported to Mars via impact ejecta, or vice versa) Also, lots of worthwhile science is done even though it doesn't have an immediate and obvious impact on everyday life. I can't think of any particular way in which the discovery of gravitational waves has changed my life, for example - but I recognize that the work that's gone into it has advanced human knowledge, and probably will indirectly benefit my life (or my descendants' lives) in ways I can't predict.
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    Sure: Is the concept of objective meaning valid in any possible universe? Is it possible for the universe to be a fully observed deterministic system? Is there a universal objective function motivating what we consider reality? Is it possible to determine with certainty the origins of what we can conceptualize as reality? Is it possible to forecast with mathematical certainty events in future time steps. Basically just off the top of my head my questions boil down to: Can laplaces demon actually exist, is there a resolution to the munchausen trilemma and is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable.
    - JackFr 7y ago
      Well sure, I take your point. We live, we die. Science tells us how it all happens, but can never tell us why it happens at all. And yet despite the certainty of death, we, individually and as a group, seem to have an unquenchable desire to know more. To know is to grow, and this collection of processes we call life has never been seen off the planet so yeah, it'd be quite some growth.
    - JasonFruit 7y ago
- trianglem 7y ago
  I read your whole post and all I can come up with is that if we found life of any sort on another planet it would completely change my internal narrative and I guarantee I'm not the only one. This would in a subtle or unsubtle way gradually influence literally most of the decisions we make on earth.
  - kd5bjo 7y ago
    > Life of any sort Aside from the narrow one involving the oxidization of carbon, I have a hard time coming up with a definition of life that doesn’t consider storms, planets, or star systems “alive”. In particular, they are all time-limited phenomena that are organized but somewhat unpredictable at macro scale and chaotic at micro scale.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      Most of them aren’t self-replicating.
- mindcrime 7y ago
  I think it's a shame that you're being downvoted for nothing more than expressing a reasonable, albeit apparently unpopular, opinion. For plenty of us, AndrewKemendo is right... learning that there is life on Mars would not answer any particularly fundamental questions. Maybe because a lot of people simply take it as a given that life exists on other planets (whether or not Mars is one of them isn't really a big issue) because they don't have the hubris to believe that there's anything so special about Earth as to believe that life could only emerge here. Frankly, you can count me in that crowd. I'd be more surprised if it was somehow proven that there isn't life anywhere else. To me, "fundamental questions" would be more like: 1. Is free will possible? If so, how? 2. How did the universe begin? If there was a "Big Bang" as popularly described, where did all the matter come from that expanded out of the initial singularity? If time did not exist before the universe began, how did the transition from state "no universe" to state "universe" happen, since - presumably - nothing can "happen" without time. 3. What is time? 4. Is space discrete or continuous? 5. Is time discrete or continuous? 6. Are there multiple dimensions of time, analogous to the multiple dimensions of space we know about? 7. Is our "4-D" world actually embedded in a higher-dimensional reality of some sort that we can't access/understand/see/etc.? 8. Is our world a simulation (ala The Matrix)? 9. How, exactly, do fields (electromagnetic field / higgs field / etc) permeate all of space and permit the existence of particles like photons or the higgs boson? 10. Is there actually a way to unify gravity and quantum mechanics? 11. What is dark matter? Where did it come from? 12. How will the universe end? Big crunch? Big freeze? Big bounce? The simulation ends and we all just disappear? Other? 13. Why is there any matter at all in the universe? The fact that there is implies a certain fundamental asymmetry to the universe, since if matter and anti-matter were created in equal amounts at the beginning, they should have annihilated each other leaving no matter behind. 14. Why are right-handed people more common than left-handed people? 15. Why does the universe itself appear to have a "handedness" property[1]? [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0812.3437.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0812.3437.pdf
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    In fact these are the lines of questioning I'm most interested in and nearly none are resolved by the existence of other intellingent life, that is unless they are more intelligent. I feel like this should be more pervasively held belief to a bunch of people with a higher than average propensity of consuming scifi. Star Trek did a pretty thorough job of showing that the same fundamental questions persist even if we assume there exist more intelligent species out there.
- anon234345566 7y ago
  But what would be the geopolitical effects of having found the ruins of an old datacenter, under the dust of a couple of millions of years, old hardware, looking like maybe 500 years more advanced than the state of the art on Earth. You would know there's tech out there, the first able to reach to it will have the edge over the rest for centuries ahead. The effects will be massive, no one dolar, yuan, yen, gold bar would be left unspent in the quest to get there and learn before the others.
rocqua 7y ago
It might be too mainstream. As in, anyone who believes in extra terrestrial life is probably an enthusiast. "Real scientists" are sceptical. Thus many scientists try hard to dismiss evidence of alien life, because that is fashionable. Or at least, the alternative is very kitschy.
- rjf72 7y ago
  I'm certain that the vast majority of scientists, physicists for certain, do "believe" in extraterrestrial life. Belief makes it sound kind of quirky though. It's essentially a probability measurement. Is it more likely that we are the only life in the universe, or not? You reach the same conclusion whether by intuition or by what crude modeling we're capable of. It's not really possible to create a compelling scientific argument for the lack of alien life. This is why the Fermi Paradox is a thing. The reason people try to discount aliens is because you can attribute literally anything to aliens. And so you reach another equally simplistic binary. You discover some unknown phenomena. It is aliens, or not? Well we've discovered a whole lot of unknown phenomena throughout the years (and centuries and millennia depending on how you want to play this game) and often times it really did look a whole lot like aliens, but to date it's never yet turned out to be them. And since the determination of an unknown phenomena often comes down to probabilities, aliens get weighted down a good deal. But nonetheless, I have no doubt that at least lurking in the back of every physicist's mind is that something now as regular as a fast radio burst could indeed finally be those LGM - the kind of joking nickname given to the first radio pulsar discovery. Standing, of course, for little green men. Is it? Well probably not, but it'll always be probably not - including when it finally is.
untog 7y ago
I think that the desire is mainstream, just look at the TV shows and movies that explore the idea of alien life. But I think the reason it’s not talked about more is that our knowledge is essentially non existent and hasn’t really changed in, say, the last fifty years?
- adrianN 7y ago
  Fifty years ago we didn't even know whether there were planets outside of our solar system.
  - untog 7y ago
    But that hasn’t really changed our knowledge of alien life much. We still know it’s possible for it to be out there, but we have no idea if it is.
    - speedplane 7y ago
      > But that hasn’t really changed our knowledge of alien life much. We still know it’s possible for it to be out there, but we have no idea if it is. The Drake equation is a nice framework to determine the probability of life outside of our planet. Sure, the end result is still a big mystery, but many of the variables in the Drake equation have been solved or narrowed down (e.g., star formation, planet formation, etc.). To say that there has been no progress in the last 50 years is silly.
  - mhh__ 7y ago
    A large amount of our solar system hadn't been mapped yet (and wouldn't be for a few decades)
asdff 7y ago
The barrier to be interested in these things is far lower than it is to directly work on them. Then there's the realities of being an american adult where even science is politicized. Think of all the boomers that grew up watching the space race with baited breath. I bet some of these same people today would support a politician who would defund NASA if it meant saving $30 a year on their taxes.
- kthejoker2 7y ago
  > baited breath Bated, as in abated. Fun fact: bated breath was coined by Shakespeare.
whynotkeithberg 7y ago
You had the desire. What job do you do though? Almost everyone on earth has the desire. But it doesn't translate to everyone contributing money or their life work to doing so.

by psaux 7y ago

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

Let's assume for a moment that we did find something resembling simple organic life on Mars and confirmed that earth isn't the only life bearing planet. What functionally changes for our existential understanding of the universe? I'd argue little to nothing. We'd learn a bit more about organic life, but no fundamental philosophical or existential questions would be resolved. Life has been confirmed to be able to thrive in many more extreme places here on earth than anywhere observed on Mars. There wouldn't be any firm resolution on the question of whether humans are the only intelligent species in the universe. I think that would be a different answer if we found inorganic life, as that would blow up the concept of organic life as singular in "life" bearing capability. I doubt we would recognize inorganic life as "life" in that case however, as humanity has a poor working definition of "life." Absent a recognizably intelligent form of life found off planet, I doubt much would change (practically or existentially) for us here on earth.

modzu 7y ago
what? so would we have a common ancestor with this organic life (like all life on earth shares)? id think that has philosophical and existential implications
dleslie 7y ago
> What functionally changes for our existential understanding of the universe? The anthropic principal becomes less compelling; to say nothing of the religious implications.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  No, because the origin of life on Mars would probably be the same event as on Earth, with life having been transferred by impact ejecta. It would not allow us to conclude that origin of life was common.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    Perhaps, or perhaps it's different enough that it most likely developed independently.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      In which case, why haven't we seen it already on Earth? Life will have been transferred back and forth between Earth and Mars for billions of years.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Religion will have absolutely no problem to adapt to new information and incorporate it as though it had always been there. This has happened time and again in the past to the point where the religions of old would have been in direct contradiction with even the most basic scientific knowledge if they didn't adapt. The funny thing is that the so-called holy books are full of stuff that no sane human would believe in. That doesn't stop a lot of people from doing just that when those books are creatively re-interpreted by intermediaries. Religion will last for a very long time into the future, forget about major lasting change on that front other than some rearguard action to ensure survival.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    I did not intend to state the implications are the end of religion; simply that many faithful will alter their faith, in no small manner.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      I highly doubt that. If the genetics, the silicon revolution, access to space imagery, quality education, the internet and science in general did not alter faith in a drastic way I don't think 'life on Mars' is going to do anything either unless it comes in the form of little green creatures.
      - dleslie 7y ago
        Curious that you don't recognize a significant shift in religious thought in the last century.
        jacquesm 7y ago
        What shift would that be? Until the 1970's or so it was getting better, since then it's gotten worse if anything. On the Christian side we have whole continents that are following some cliff notes' version of Christianity, mostly centered around money and some opportunistic politics. On the Islamic side a small group of fanatics has managed to divide the world in a way that seemed unthinkable 25 years ago and so on.
- mindcrime 7y ago
  Nah... religious people don't depend on reason, logic, evidence, etc. They can (and will) always absorb any new discovery and incorporate it into their belief systems in such a way that it doesn't invalidate anything they already believe. Some people think Christians would have a hard time with extra-Terran life because the Bible doesn't mention any life other than the life here, and therefore any such life would arguably be free from the weight of Original Sin, yada yada yada. But I'm pretty sure if life on another planet was discovered (even intelligent life) they would just reinterpret the Biblical references that seem to refer to "Earth" as referring to "The Universe" and make "The Garden of Eden" a metaphor, and the flaming sword would become a supernova, blah, etc., yada, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, approximately 0.0% of Christians would say "Hmm... the Bible is obviously incomplete and or inaccurate, so maybe the whole thing is a load of bollocks" or whatever. And I expect it would be about the same for every other faith.
defterGoose 7y ago
I'd argue that the jump from 0 to 1 of "knowledge of life on other planets" would be huge. Currently, we have an almost pseudo-religious understanding of what place life holds in the universe, but that's based on the fact that when we've looked up at the cosmos for all of history, it seemed impossibly devoid of anything familiar. The discovery of life on another planet (even if that life somehow originated on Earth), turns the proposition of finding intelligent life elsewhere from at best a 50/50 question of belief into a near certainty. And that is huge.
- wallace_f 7y ago
  >we've looked up at the cosmos for all of history, it seemed impossibly devoid of anything This is popularly misunderstood. We obviously don't see Type 3 civilizations, but if another of our own civilization was in our galaxy, we would have had an very small to extremely small chance of seeing it. I'd wager life is everywhere, and just as is the case on earth, it pays, in terms of survival, to blend in with your surroundings.
- rgross1 7y ago
  Disagree- folks outside of the sci-fi bubble won't appreciate microbes on other planets. 0 to 1 happens when we find multicellular organisms with cognitive capabilities IMO
  - gsich 7y ago
    Doesn't really matter.
  - ksaj 7y ago
    Those come later, in the form of evolution. If we find the precursors alone, novel forms of single cell life still at that early stage, we can learn a whole lot about how multi-cellular life came about.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    "Folks outside of the sci-fi bubble" rarely appdeciate much about non-monetary impacts of space. But discovering life - even alien life - would really shake up many big religions, which tend to assume we're special, unique creations. I'm sure religions would eventually evolve to accomodate the discovery in their belief systems, but it would get noticed by regular Joes and Janes.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Presuming SpaceX pull off their plans, there will be trips to and from Mars. We'd better be pretty sure what microbes we're being exposed to or bringing back to Earth before we do. Or we might get a repeat of when the Spanish brought disease to the Inca and Maya. The mere knowledge of life is viable off-Earth is huge. If we find it on our nearest neighbour, the chances of encountering it elsewhere rise markedly. Hopefully it would trigger a search elsewhere in the solar system, like Europa.
- lovemenot 7y ago
  >> Or we might get a repeat of when the Spanish brought disease to the Inca and Maya. Unlikely. There's been no animal hosts on Mars, in which such a micro-organism might have evolved to threaten humans on Earth. Not to say we shouldn't be careful for other reasons though. The bigger risk is the sudden extinction of entirely different branches of life, by more highly-evolved Earth-originating species.
  - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
    I think the other person is saying that Earth bacteria could potentially wipe out Martian bacteria if the conditions are right. And that would be tragic.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      That was exactly my thought. We discover extraterrestrial life, and inadvertently wipe it out, or just swamp them with an invasive species, without getting a chance to study them before we mucked up their ecosystem. As you say it would be tragic, but also very typically human.
cabalamat 7y ago
> What functionally changes for our existential understanding of the universe? I'd argue little to nothing. It depends on how different it is chemically form earth life. If it is similar enough that it shares a common origin, it's no big deal. If it isn't, then that's a massive deal because it means life originated twice in one solar system, therefore is probably widespread.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  Whats the common origin of organic life again?
  - monadgonad 7y ago
    That it originated on one planet and was sent to the other by ejecta, as mentioned in the article.
    - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
      That's a hypothesis... It's still totally speculative
joshmarlow 7y ago
If the life evolved independently of life on earth (ie, no panspermia or anything like that), then it would have philosophical/existential implications because of the Great Filter Hypothesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. Edit for a TL;DR - The basic idea is that, if we don't see evidence of intelligent life in the universe, it must be because star traveling species must be rare. If we find life evolving twice in one solar system, then the early parts of life evolving must be relatively easy - which suggests the later parts of life becoming technologically advanced are the hard parts. In other words, life on Mars may mean that there may be more problems ahead of us than behind us.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  If it were organic, we would not know if that life evolved independently from life on earth though. So, again finding non-intelligent organic life elsewhere doesn't answer the question of where did we come from. Simply verifying distance between two similar things isn't a sufficient variable to answer questions about distinctiveness of origin.
- CardenB 7y ago
  Not necessarily. It just suggests the bottleneck for life lies at whatever point is after mars. Nothing would suggest that complex life gets progressively more difficult to evolve.
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    Right now there are a few places for the great filter. To my knowledge: 1. Life 2. Multicellular life 3. Intelligent life 4. Interstellar colonization tech If you make it through all levels you should be colonizing the galaxy and detectable by us therefore. Finding life with a separate origin than ours removes one of the possible spots for the great filter and makes it significantly more likely that the great filter is ahead of us rather than behind. This is a question that will help with the survival of humanity.
evil-olive 7y ago
> no fundamental philosophical or existential questions would be resolved If you don't consider "does life exist on other planets?" to be a fundamental, existential question, can you share an example of what you do think is such a fundamental question? Finding life on Mars wouldn't necessarily resolve any fundamental questions, but it would open up a whole new realm of questions. Is it similar to life on Earth? How similar? Is there evidence for or against some form of panspermia? (at its most extreme, life arriving on Earth from outside the solar system, but this could also be life arising on Earth and being transported to Mars via impact ejecta, or vice versa) Also, lots of worthwhile science is done even though it doesn't have an immediate and obvious impact on everyday life. I can't think of any particular way in which the discovery of gravitational waves has changed my life, for example - but I recognize that the work that's gone into it has advanced human knowledge, and probably will indirectly benefit my life (or my descendants' lives) in ways I can't predict.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  Sure: Is the concept of objective meaning valid in any possible universe? Is it possible for the universe to be a fully observed deterministic system? Is there a universal objective function motivating what we consider reality? Is it possible to determine with certainty the origins of what we can conceptualize as reality? Is it possible to forecast with mathematical certainty events in future time steps. Basically just off the top of my head my questions boil down to: Can laplaces demon actually exist, is there a resolution to the munchausen trilemma and is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    Well sure, I take your point. We live, we die. Science tells us how it all happens, but can never tell us why it happens at all. And yet despite the certainty of death, we, individually and as a group, seem to have an unquenchable desire to know more. To know is to grow, and this collection of processes we call life has never been seen off the planet so yeah, it'd be quite some growth.
  - JasonFruit 7y ago
trianglem 7y ago
I read your whole post and all I can come up with is that if we found life of any sort on another planet it would completely change my internal narrative and I guarantee I'm not the only one. This would in a subtle or unsubtle way gradually influence literally most of the decisions we make on earth.
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  > Life of any sort Aside from the narrow one involving the oxidization of carbon, I have a hard time coming up with a definition of life that doesn’t consider storms, planets, or star systems “alive”. In particular, they are all time-limited phenomena that are organized but somewhat unpredictable at macro scale and chaotic at micro scale.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Most of them aren’t self-replicating.
mindcrime 7y ago
I think it's a shame that you're being downvoted for nothing more than expressing a reasonable, albeit apparently unpopular, opinion. For plenty of us, AndrewKemendo is right... learning that there is life on Mars would not answer any particularly fundamental questions. Maybe because a lot of people simply take it as a given that life exists on other planets (whether or not Mars is one of them isn't really a big issue) because they don't have the hubris to believe that there's anything so special about Earth as to believe that life could only emerge here. Frankly, you can count me in that crowd. I'd be more surprised if it was somehow proven that there isn't life anywhere else. To me, "fundamental questions" would be more like: 1. Is free will possible? If so, how? 2. How did the universe begin? If there was a "Big Bang" as popularly described, where did all the matter come from that expanded out of the initial singularity? If time did not exist before the universe began, how did the transition from state "no universe" to state "universe" happen, since - presumably - nothing can "happen" without time. 3. What is time? 4. Is space discrete or continuous? 5. Is time discrete or continuous? 6. Are there multiple dimensions of time, analogous to the multiple dimensions of space we know about? 7. Is our "4-D" world actually embedded in a higher-dimensional reality of some sort that we can't access/understand/see/etc.? 8. Is our world a simulation (ala The Matrix)? 9. How, exactly, do fields (electromagnetic field / higgs field / etc) permeate all of space and permit the existence of particles like photons or the higgs boson? 10. Is there actually a way to unify gravity and quantum mechanics? 11. What is dark matter? Where did it come from? 12. How will the universe end? Big crunch? Big freeze? Big bounce? The simulation ends and we all just disappear? Other? 13. Why is there any matter at all in the universe? The fact that there is implies a certain fundamental asymmetry to the universe, since if matter and anti-matter were created in equal amounts at the beginning, they should have annihilated each other leaving no matter behind. 14. Why are right-handed people more common than left-handed people? 15. Why does the universe itself appear to have a "handedness" property[1]? [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0812.3437.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0812.3437.pdf
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  In fact these are the lines of questioning I'm most interested in and nearly none are resolved by the existence of other intellingent life, that is unless they are more intelligent. I feel like this should be more pervasively held belief to a bunch of people with a higher than average propensity of consuming scifi. Star Trek did a pretty thorough job of showing that the same fundamental questions persist even if we assume there exist more intelligent species out there.
anon234345566 7y ago
But what would be the geopolitical effects of having found the ruins of an old datacenter, under the dust of a couple of millions of years, old hardware, looking like maybe 500 years more advanced than the state of the art on Earth. You would know there's tech out there, the first able to reach to it will have the edge over the rest for centuries ahead. The effects will be massive, no one dolar, yuan, yen, gold bar would be left unspent in the quest to get there and learn before the others.

rocqua 7y ago

It might be too mainstream. As in, anyone who believes in extra terrestrial life is probably an enthusiast. "Real scientists" are sceptical. Thus many scientists try hard to dismiss evidence of alien life, because that is fashionable. Or at least, the alternative is very kitschy.

rjf72 7y ago
I'm certain that the vast majority of scientists, physicists for certain, do "believe" in extraterrestrial life. Belief makes it sound kind of quirky though. It's essentially a probability measurement. Is it more likely that we are the only life in the universe, or not? You reach the same conclusion whether by intuition or by what crude modeling we're capable of. It's not really possible to create a compelling scientific argument for the lack of alien life. This is why the Fermi Paradox is a thing. The reason people try to discount aliens is because you can attribute literally anything to aliens. And so you reach another equally simplistic binary. You discover some unknown phenomena. It is aliens, or not? Well we've discovered a whole lot of unknown phenomena throughout the years (and centuries and millennia depending on how you want to play this game) and often times it really did look a whole lot like aliens, but to date it's never yet turned out to be them. And since the determination of an unknown phenomena often comes down to probabilities, aliens get weighted down a good deal. But nonetheless, I have no doubt that at least lurking in the back of every physicist's mind is that something now as regular as a fast radio burst could indeed finally be those LGM - the kind of joking nickname given to the first radio pulsar discovery. Standing, of course, for little green men. Is it? Well probably not, but it'll always be probably not - including when it finally is.

untog 7y ago

I think that the desire is mainstream, just look at the TV shows and movies that explore the idea of alien life. But I think the reason it’s not talked about more is that our knowledge is essentially non existent and hasn’t really changed in, say, the last fifty years?

adrianN 7y ago
Fifty years ago we didn't even know whether there were planets outside of our solar system.
- untog 7y ago
  But that hasn’t really changed our knowledge of alien life much. We still know it’s possible for it to be out there, but we have no idea if it is.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > But that hasn’t really changed our knowledge of alien life much. We still know it’s possible for it to be out there, but we have no idea if it is. The Drake equation is a nice framework to determine the probability of life outside of our planet. Sure, the end result is still a big mystery, but many of the variables in the Drake equation have been solved or narrowed down (e.g., star formation, planet formation, etc.). To say that there has been no progress in the last 50 years is silly.
- mhh__ 7y ago
  A large amount of our solar system hadn't been mapped yet (and wouldn't be for a few decades)

asdff 7y ago

The barrier to be interested in these things is far lower than it is to directly work on them. Then there's the realities of being an american adult where even science is politicized. Think of all the boomers that grew up watching the space race with baited breath. I bet some of these same people today would support a politician who would defund NASA if it meant saving $30 a year on their taxes.

kthejoker2 7y ago
> baited breath Bated, as in abated. Fun fact: bated breath was coined by Shakespeare.

whynotkeithberg 7y ago

You had the desire. What job do you do though? Almost everyone on earth has the desire. But it doesn't translate to everyone contributing money or their life work to doing so.