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In the evolution of life there are events that appear to be difficult, and events that appear to be easy: 1. The creation of life seems to be easy as the first
by gpt5 5y ago
In the evolution of life there are events that appear to be difficult, and events that appear to be easy:
1. The creation of life seems to be easy as the first life appeared very close to earth formation, in a very hostile environment (unless that seeding of life was done intentionally).
2. Sexual reproduction seems hard - it took 2.5B years to evolve, despite the significant evolutionary advantage
3. Plants and animal seem hard again - it took another billion years after sexual reproduction.
After plants and animals appeared, things seemed to accelerate, so for example you could say that having an intelligent species take over the world seems inevitable.
The problem is that those timescales are getting close to the entire lifespan of earth. Within a few hundred million years we expect the oceans to boil and all life to die. So even on earth, with a single sample, it appears that we are incredibly lucky to reach where we reached.
- jjoonathan 5y agoWhat's the mechanism for boiling oceans? I thought the Sun was a few billion years away from going red giant. Personally, if I had to bet on an early filter, I'd go for the eukaryotic transition. Not so much the "having a nucleus" part, more the "dealing with genes at scale" part, because it requires so much machinery so low in the stack with so many knock-on effects and such a long payoff horizon. It's like the single-thread to multi-thread transition, except instead of everyone agreeing that multi-thread was the future and merely struggling to get there, we instead had a situation where everyone was trying to eat (literally, as in cannibalize) the proponents of multi-thread if their programs failed to go faster per dollar of hardware.
- tuatoru 5y agoThe sun's luminosity is increasing over time. "In about one billion years, the solar luminosity will be 10% higher than at present. This will cause the atmosphere to become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans."[2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_paradox 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth
- jjoonathan 5y agoCool, I hadn't heard about that. Thanks!