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Proof of life outside earth would be the coolest
by Gys 6y ago
Proof of life outside earth would be the coolest
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoGive it 20yr. Between Mars and the gas giant's moons there's almost certainly some, possibly long dead, bacteria out there. Whether we share a common ancestor is anyone's guess.
- ryanSrich 6y agoEven finding dead alien bacteria would be a miracle. Time is the great constraint of finding life. It's less about where are the aliens, and more about when.
- arethuza 6y agoSome people think that would be very bad as it would suggest that the Great Filter is in our future rather than our past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoScary.
- piptastic 6y agoHmm, maybe I'm missing something, but the main argument for the Great Filter is that we haven't observed any extraterrestrial life. If we started observing that life, that might just mean that so far our observation technology has not been good enough previously.
- dyingkneepad 6y agoYeah, detecting life could mean many things: - The filter is ahead us - There is no filter - The filter is behind us, but ahead of the other planet - Both planets have successfully got past the filter We'll still be debating :). Then we'll go crazy trying find evidence of life in more planets.
- adventured 6y agoAn addition to there is no filter (yet): - We're one of the first nearby and we're going to help build a filter The various AI we give birth to over the next two centuries are going to dominate several galaxies. There are many filters - competing standards - throughout the universe, our galaxy doesn't yet have one. Humans will cease to exist as we think of them now, within those two centuries (and not due to climate change or any other similar event).
- catwind7 6y agothat said, the likelihood of there being _no_ filter is still lower than the others. if we detect life so near to us and _yet_ we still have yet to encounter life from another planet means there's likely still _some_ kind of filter. So I don't think the likelihood of no filter is high if we detect life
- majkinetor 6y agoRather then apocaliptyical filter, the most probable reason is that space is so wast that even if advanced life was common, chance of meeting/observing one would be next to 0. Think about our civ living on a sand grain in the desert - the chance is almost 0 to encounter another civ living on sand grain on random desert location no matter how advanced your tech is.
- catwind7 6y agoyikes - that's true, we could still move life beyond earth and still never meet another civ. I didn't realize this at first but I was conflating the two
- est31 6y agoWe can't detect life at our stage of development from afar, or from earlier stages, but things that extremely advanced civilizations build like dyson spheres can't be hidden really. The issue is that the universe is extremely old compared to how long it took for earth to develop life. It's ample time for civilizations to develop technologies extremely far more advanced than ours. So why isn't there a single civilization that's so advanced that it builds these things? So there must be some "filter" that prevents civilizations from doing that, whether they are alive or dead. Maybe they just don't want to, but then ALL of them have to not want to do it, which would be weird. If we detect life close to us, it makes it more likely that there is tons of life around the galaxy, which makes it more likely that the filter is ahead of us. If we detect no life close to us, it makes it more likely that the filter is past us. See this Kurzgesagt video about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
- TremendousJudge 6y agoI don't like that theory, it's completely limited by our current understanding of how a "more advanced" civilization would look like. If we haven't seen signs of what we think more advanced civilizations would look like, the simplest explanation is that what we think advanced civilizations are like is wrong
- oska 6y agoI agree. Saying that a Dyson Sphere is something that an 'extremely advanced civilization would build' presumes that we can project the course of civilization. Seems presumptuous and short sighted to me.
- Gibbon1 6y agoYeah a Dyson Sphere contains the presumption that an advanced alien civilization's population would grow exponentially like earths population did in the 20th century. I don't know how you square a utterly stupid idea like exponential population growth with the word advanced in advanced civilization. Instead this sounds like blinkered mid twentieth century thinking. Or the old science fiction trope of seeing the future as like the present but more of it.
- catwind7 6y agojust learned about the "great filter", very interesting. I think it does mean that our observation tech is not good previously - it also sounds like if we did start observing life, the fact that we have yet to be visited / colonized by that life form means only re-affirms the unlikelihood of interplanetary travel.. according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter): > So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.[4]
- bickeringyokel 6y agoImagine that, knowing there's intelligent life out there, but knowing we will never meaningfully interact with them because it's impossible to travel any useful distance or communicate in any real way. Even if we could travel vast distances, It seems likely if we discover any life out there it may be long dead by the time we get there.
- bosswipe 6y agoMaybe the Great Filter is global warming, or other similar planetary pollution. Once a civilization ramps up Moloch[1], the self-reinforcing self-perpetuating structures necessary to organize industry at a planetary scale, it becomes too difficult to pull back and stop it before it's too late. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoUnlikely. We're going to have a hard time dumping enough anything into the atmosphere (or causing some other kind of pollution) to kill ourselves entirely. We'd osculate around an equilibrium where we dump some pollutant into our environment to the point where our population decreases, natural processes remove it and our population increases, wash, rinse, repeat. You can see similar population and resource usage patterns in many ecosystems. And before anyone tries to twist my words to saying global warming isn't a bad thing, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that humans as a species will likely survive it.
- bosswipe 6y agoIt's not species extinction that makes life undetectable, it's extinction of the civilization. For a civilization to be detectable it has to be at least at our level, or maybe a century beyond our level. If our civilization collapses it would mean that we were only detectable for a couple of centuries and then it could take millennia for us to get back to our level, especially if we've extracted all the easy to extract natural resources making it harder for our ancestors to rev back up, or if large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.
- macintux 6y agoThis seems like humanity’s last advanced civilization: the easy energy is all tapped out. Maybe some other life form could have one after enough time has passed, but we can’t bootstrap ourselves a second time. (Edit: to be clear, I’m agreeing with you.)
- simias 6y agoEven if we passed a Great Filter it doesn't necessarily mean that there wouldn't be an other one in front of us. Also not finding other civilizations wouldn't be a proof that we passed any filter at all, maybe plenty of civilizations have been incredibly successful already, they're just so far beyond our comprehension of the world and consciousness that we can't meaningfully interact with them.
- gorkish 6y agoWe can't honestly have any practical discussion about the concept of a Great Filter until we get to the point that our observational capability would be sufficient to reliably detect another civilization at a similar level of development to our own within a sufficient size search space: within our own galaxy for instance. Considering that 68% of the universe's energy and 27% of its mass is still basically unaccounted for, it's clear we have a very long way to go before this idea is worth bringing out of the halls of existential philosophy. Let's say for the sake of argument that a civilization exists in our nearest neighbor system, Proxima Centauri. Let's assume that it has developed with a similar impact to their system as humans have had to our own -- radio emissions, a handful of interplanetary and interstellar space probes, nuclear tests, etc. Could we detect them? Everything I have read concludes that we currently could not. The concept of being able to receive interstellar TV transmissions is such a sci-fi trope I don't think very many people consider that it is essentially impossible.
- vl 6y agoThe argument is that on this timescales they would be here for now. But all this doesn’t really matter since you can’t apply frequentist logic in bayesian situation: what we observe is exactly the same as someone in the long tail of distribution would observe, i.e. we can’t distinguish between this being unlikely situation and being first, or this being proof of Great Filter.
- koheripbal 6y agoWe cannot change the existence of one or more Great Filters. Our best chance of survival is finding out about one as soon as possible. ...so the only path remains forward.
- birdyrooster 6y agoWhy is this very bad? What is wrong with society not existing if it’s inevitable. Is dying very bad or is it an inescapable reality that isn’t good or bad? What is inherently good about life existing or spending the finite energy of the cosmos? It all comes to an end eventually. Is that bad? Can humans offer anything to the universe other than parasitism?
- s1artibartfast 6y agoOne persons parasitism is another's enrichment. Supporters of ethical hedonism hold that the enjoyment of life holds axiomatic value, and life itself is a prerequisite for enjoyment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism
- birdyrooster 6y agoSure, but the Universe is going to die and we don’t seem to have any way to save it
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI fail to see how the inevitable “death” of the the universe has any bearing on it being good or bad. Or life being good or bad
- birdyrooster 6y agoYeah I am not sure where I was going with that. I think I’ve read too much “the universe is conscious” woo.
- macintux 6y agoIt seems odd that the universe would be as vast and fascinating as it is but there be no one to appreciate it. I want humanity to reach another galaxy someday.
- anonAndOn 6y agoPerhaps the Great Filter is not a single event? Perhaps it can happen more than once and occasionally shows up as a large space rock. [0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
- peroporque 6y agoStep 1: define "life"