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IMO, I don't think it should be a surprise that we will eventually find signs of extraterrestial (but not necessarily intelligent) life in our solar system. The
by woeirua 6y ago
IMO, I don't think it should be a surprise that we will eventually find signs of extraterrestial (but not necessarily intelligent) life in our solar system. The real question is: does it share any common building blocks with life on Earth or not? The answer to that question could dramatically change our understanding of our place in the universe as well as open up entire new fields of productive research in biochemistry.
- Ericson2314 6y agoYeah, if it's really similar it will blow brains for one reason, and if it's really different for another. I hope it's really different. I don't want to be that special.
- hnracer 6y agoI hope it's the same, because if it's different it suggests our impending extinction. At least according to the logic of Bostrom's Great Filter.
- klysm 6y agoConversely wouldn’t imply the other life’s impending extinction symmetrically?
- hnracer 6y agoIt would imply their extinction far into the future, after they've evolved to our level of intelligence, since our existence implies that the Great Filter exists ahead of us, not behind us
- pharke 6y agoI don't think we know enough to say that for sure. If you are defining the great filter as the cause of the Fermi Paradox then it very well could be in our past. For example, the conditions or specific mutation that gave rise to multi-cellular life could be the great filter meaning that single celled life could be incredibly common but multicellular life might be almost entirely non-existent.
- hnracer 6y agoWe might want to say that our existence is some evidence that the filter is ahead of us but it could certainly be behind us (in which case the logic of the Great Filter doesn't apply for our civilization)
- MiroF 6y ago> the conditions or specific mutation that gave rise to multi-cellular life Doubtful, given that we've been able to recreate multicellularity evolving in the lab. The initial jump to life, not so much.
- MiroF 6y ago> Conversely wouldn’t imply the other life’s impending extinction symmetrically? Yes and?
- klysm 6y agoJust wanted to clarify that the implication arrow pointed both ways if it pointed one way, so I guess and that?
- marcusverus 6y agoThere are so many fascinating possibilities. 1) DNA based life with genetic overlap (potentially indicating that Mars life seeded earth life, or vs.vs). 2) DNA based life with no genetic overlap (possibly indicating original life on mars, or a common seed source for Earth and Mars) 3) Radical, non DNA based life (indicating original life on mars) 4) E. coli (indicating that NASA needs to fire their sterilization team). I'm sure there are more fascinating possibilities that I'm not aware of!
- dogma1138 6y agoDNA with different chirality (would likely prove distinct origins better than genetic overlap, if life was seeded from the same origin billions of years ago there could be no overlap today, and some overlap doesn't prove origin either since gene can develop independently even very specific mutations), proto-life - RNA world/self replicating proteins... Both of those would likely be a "more interesting" thing to study. The most boring part would likely be finding DNA life which is quite similar, I'm not sure it would point to any specific origin and if it's metabolically going to be quite similar to some life we can find on earth the overall new science from it might be fairly limited.
- tru3_power 6y agoSerious question here, but are there any concerns about potentially finding some type of non-intelligent life that could threaten us? Some kind of bacteria like organism that could wreak havoc on mankind? I’m sure there are a ton of strict processes around returning samples back to earth but I’ve never really read anything mentioning this threat when it comes to finding life outside our planet.
- arrosenberg 6y agoIt seems pretty unlikely, albeit not impossible. Life on Earth has evolved over an extremely long period, and advanced species have very robust immune systems against cellular life. When you consider that Earth already has viruses and bacteria that adapt very rapidly, that have spent eons competing with existing life — I think it's unlikely we'd find an bacteria or virus that could successfully infect Earth based organisms in a way that threatens us.
- soperj 6y agoWe're going through a pandemic right now because a virus has successfully found a way to evade our robust immune systems. You can take a country as deadly as Australia and introduce something as innocuous as 24 rabbits, and it can have an absolutely devastating effect on the ecosystem. Frankly it's beyond hubris to suggest that we'd be fine just because of the way we've evolved.
- woeirua 6y agoIt really depends on what ET life looks like. If it shares a common set of DNA for example then it would be much more likely that it could be dangerous. But if it’s not even Carbon based then it could be totally inert to us and vice versa. The biochemistry might literally prevent all interactions. We won’t know until we can examine it up close.
- NineStarPoint 6y agoA virus that co-evolved along with us, specifically being able to infect complex cellular life in the way it has evolved on earth. Anything from another planet wouldn’t have developed in a way that lets it get past our immune system not because or complexity, but because of lacking the shared evolutionary history. Something that represented a danger to us from another planet would have to be an issue in how simplistic it was...like mad cow disease style prions, or a parasite that happens to attack us in a novel way. Something virus like just wouldn’t be an issue.
- TLightful 6y agoSecondly, are they a democracy?
- FooHentai 6y agoThird, do they have any oil?
- sabertoothed 6y agoFourth, are they Christian yet?
- vkou 6y agoWould it actually change our understanding? We know that if we apply an energy gradient through a soup of ammonia, methane, and water vapour, we get the fundamental building blocks of Earth life. If we discovered these same blocks on another planet, that has all of these pre-conditions, what would it tell us?
- airstrike 6y agoI think the parent is arguing that if we discovered different building blocks, it would change everything. Random link from Google https://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/possibility-silicon-based-life-grows/ https://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/possibility-silicon-...
- ramraj07 6y agoAnyone who has tried to keep their culture plates sterile in a lab will probably appreciate panspermia more than regular people. I'll personally put all my money into life being found at least fossilized not just in Mars but in europa and anywhere with liquid water, and sharing the same fundamental dna-protein-genetic code makeup as us (but probably little else). The way I see it, once life forms on one planet, it probably starts spreading seeds on a cosmic scale quite promiscuously. The speed at which life arose in earth as soon as conditions were right suggests that there's always microbes floating into the planet ready to take advantage. This also would mean that there's no opportunity for any other form of life to develop in the same conditions - dna based life probably has a monopoly on water based planets throughout the galaxy
- MiroF 6y agoI think you are substantially underestimating the scale of the galaxy and the vastness of space to make a claim like "dna based life probably has a monopoly on water based planets throughout the galaxy"
- ramraj07 6y agoI'd argue you are also substantially underestimating the scale and numerousness of biology: your body alone has more bacterial cells than there are stars in the observable universe - all you need is one viable cell to seed an entire planet. A planet teeming with life if it was shattered due to a collision would catapult billions or trillions of seed containing rocks across the galaxy. We have three unfathomable scales competing each other - light years in distance and 100s of billions of stars, billions of years and quadrillions or more of seed cells potentially floating in space. Of course any of these factors could he off by a few orders of magnitude but it's hard to suggest one hypothesis is more valid than other without data.
- ohazi 6y agoNitpick: you certainly do not actually mean the observable universe Bacterial cells in one adult human body: ~100 trillion Stars in observable universe: ~1 billion trillion You're off by seven orders of magnitude.
- bamboozled 6y agoIf it’s not like ours, how would we know what to look for in the first place ? I mean we have a definition of life and it’s building blocks, and we don’t consider a rock having a life, even though it does have a lifecycle.