4 ms·

There is a pretty significant gap in the implications of the existence of exoplanets and in the implications of the existence of exobiology. Prior to the detec

There is a pretty significant gap in the implications of the existence of exoplanets and in the implications of the existence of exobiology. Prior to the detection of exoplanets, there was likely still a general consensus that they probably exist, because that didn't really have any implications for our model of the universe. It was understandable that the technology of the time was just not capable of detecting things that small. The question of life becomes more complicated because what it means in terms of detectability is completely different depending on the conditions. Depending on how common it is, things range from it being weird we haven't detected any yet to it being so rare that our existence is indeed special.

defrost 3y ago
> to it being so rare that our existence is indeed special. Which is possible but hardly reasonable . . . Many in STEM would argue that it's reasonable to assume we're not at all special.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  Life may not be "special", but we (our lineage) has gone through a few demonstrably evolutionarily rare events to get to the point we are.
  - defrost 3y ago
    The question is whether there is life elsewhere, not whether we have replicants "out there". That said, the entire universe as is appears to be in incredibly rare event, moreso than mere evolution.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      I kind of meant "we" as "intelligent life" capable of astronomical science. We have no idea how rare the universe is because we can't compare it to anything. We can compare terrestrial species to all of the other terrestrial species we know of. This shows that some evolutionary trajectories and forms appear to be more or less frequent outcomes.
      - defrost 3y ago
        > We have no idea how rare the universe is because we can't compare it to anything. Good luck floating that past your typical theoretical astrophysicist, there are several quite different approaches to taking a stab at that one - all fall into can't be resolved either way basket though, I see your point. fnordpiglet mentions the rare earth notion, I first came across that in the mid 70's reading an Asimov non fiction essay collection The Tragedy of the Moon which raised the importance(??) of having a moon to create tides to create intertidal zones to nudge life from water to land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_the_Moon There's a long chain of chance that lies behind ourselves arriving where we are ... the argument can still be made (as it was by Douglas Adams) that "The universe is big. Really Big." The latest JWT images convey just a smidgeon of how big with high res images of tiny arc areas of the night sky packed with tiny lights that are each galaxies the size of the milky way and more. That's a lot of rolls of the dice out there.
        fnordpiglet 3y ago
        The space is big, but time is vast too. There was a time in the universe when the entire universe averaged a temperature conducive to life and there was oxygen, carbon, and other crucial elements available (although not as plentiful as now). Life could have formed then, and largely died out. In fact life may only pop up rarely in both space and time, so rarely that it’s unlikely two planets have life within a detectable distance at the same time. In fact it’s even possible a highly advanced civilization formed on the earth many millions of years ago, and at those time scales all detectable traces of its existence would be wiped out. The scales of time and space are so vast we fail to comprehend how infinitesimal our scales are and make huge assumptions about what’s plausible based on our scales projected to universal scales. That’s geocentric! Also, possible doesn’t mean plausible. Objects can teleport to the moon through quantum principles it’s just so unlikely it’s never actually happens in reality. Life may be such a vastly implausible thing that our existence is a miracle so improbable it beggars the imagination.
  - RHSman2 3y ago
    In the universe we inhabit, what does rare mean? I think we think it is rare but we have no concept of the scale of the possible interactions.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  That's the entire point of the fermi paradox. The reasonable assumption as with most things is that we aren't special, yet the data increasingly does not appear to reflect that. Unlike with detecting exoplanets, blaming our sensors only makes this discrepancy worse. Unless you're trying to make the argument that we haven't found life because we're looking for specifically Earth-like life, in which case I'd just say that it's more rational with our current technology to focus on the kind of life we definitely know can exist rather than hypothetical biochemstries we can't realistically test. It isn't even as if the conditions we're setting are especially extreme, a planet in a goldilocks zone of a relatively stable star with an atmosphere and signatures of water and potentially significant amounts of oxygen.
  - defrost 3y ago
    The Fermi paradox assumes detection | communication is desirable | possible | recognisable by us. It relates to intelligent lifeforms that show themselves in ways we can recognise. It has little bearing on the question of life elsewhere - a starfish orbiting an exoplanet counts here. Fermi was a little naive on the "space is big | communication is hard" front - before the James Cook expeditions life existed in Australia and yet the British monarchy hadn't received a single missive by Royal Mail from any of the numerous nations within Australia. The methods of signalling long distances that we're aware of require focus and|or vast amounts of power and extremely long travel times; focus requires us to be targetted over a staggeringly large number of other solar systems, weilding vast amounts of power requires tech able to do so and not find other more efficient means, etc. Those communicating across galaxies are doing so in ways we do not yet recognise, those with civilisations that cause their own suns to give them away are yet to be found as we have barely starting looking at a fraction of all the systems there are out there - JWT is good but it's barely been up a day in cosmic terms and there's much left to look at.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    The Fermi paradox isn’t what I would point to. It makes a lot of assumptions. The rare earth hypothesis is much more rooted in first principles. The earth has a very rare combination of factors all of which are crucial to life as we know it, and likely anything we could recognize as life due to the factors life requires for maintaining its complexity and ability to self replicate and perpetuate. These are not limited to the specific nature of carbon, water, and oxygen in the Goldilocks zones, the necessity of a magnetosphere, in a very specific galactic structure in a specific part of such a galactic structure, making the specific envelope of Sol and earth with its unique tectonic geology, etc, all of which are literally necessary to evolve life. Other forms of life are theorized (silicon based, etc) but they have almost impossible requirements to assemble into structures complex enough with enough flow of energy without so much energy they fall apart. Every theorized xenobiology other than the one we have is likely impossible for pretty fundamental reasons. This doesn’t mean we have exhausted all possibilities or that nature won’t surprise us in crazy ways beyond our imagination, it just means life is almost certainly MUCH MUCH more rare than drakes equation lets on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis Again, I’m not saying life doesn’t exist outside earth. I’m saying we don’t know and despite really hard efforts to approach extraterrestrial life from every possible angle has been fruitless so far, even to the point we have no theories of life’s origins, how to detect life, and no open avenues that have any hope of such a discovery. At the moment it’s feeling less likely we will discover life outside the earth before we can reverse time (as we have done in simple time crystals). That should be daunting to our blind faith. To my mind this should weigh on us as a burden. As long as we believe life exists elsewhere the loss of life on earth is sad, but ultimately inconsequential. If we are the seed of life in the practically observable universe, then we are the shepherd of the most amazing thing in all of creation. We have a responsibility to tend it, and IMO, spread it as far and wide as we can such that the universe does team with life and for the rest of all time life never feels alone.

defrost 3y ago

> to it being so rare that our existence is indeed special. Which is possible but hardly reasonable . . . Many in STEM would argue that it's reasonable to assume we're not at all special.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
Life may not be "special", but we (our lineage) has gone through a few demonstrably evolutionarily rare events to get to the point we are.
- defrost 3y ago
  The question is whether there is life elsewhere, not whether we have replicants "out there". That said, the entire universe as is appears to be in incredibly rare event, moreso than mere evolution.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    I kind of meant "we" as "intelligent life" capable of astronomical science. We have no idea how rare the universe is because we can't compare it to anything. We can compare terrestrial species to all of the other terrestrial species we know of. This shows that some evolutionary trajectories and forms appear to be more or less frequent outcomes.
    - defrost 3y ago
      > We have no idea how rare the universe is because we can't compare it to anything. Good luck floating that past your typical theoretical astrophysicist, there are several quite different approaches to taking a stab at that one - all fall into can't be resolved either way basket though, I see your point. fnordpiglet mentions the rare earth notion, I first came across that in the mid 70's reading an Asimov non fiction essay collection The Tragedy of the Moon which raised the importance(??) of having a moon to create tides to create intertidal zones to nudge life from water to land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_the_Moon There's a long chain of chance that lies behind ourselves arriving where we are ... the argument can still be made (as it was by Douglas Adams) that "The universe is big. Really Big." The latest JWT images convey just a smidgeon of how big with high res images of tiny arc areas of the night sky packed with tiny lights that are each galaxies the size of the milky way and more. That's a lot of rolls of the dice out there.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        The space is big, but time is vast too. There was a time in the universe when the entire universe averaged a temperature conducive to life and there was oxygen, carbon, and other crucial elements available (although not as plentiful as now). Life could have formed then, and largely died out. In fact life may only pop up rarely in both space and time, so rarely that it’s unlikely two planets have life within a detectable distance at the same time. In fact it’s even possible a highly advanced civilization formed on the earth many millions of years ago, and at those time scales all detectable traces of its existence would be wiped out. The scales of time and space are so vast we fail to comprehend how infinitesimal our scales are and make huge assumptions about what’s plausible based on our scales projected to universal scales. That’s geocentric! Also, possible doesn’t mean plausible. Objects can teleport to the moon through quantum principles it’s just so unlikely it’s never actually happens in reality. Life may be such a vastly implausible thing that our existence is a miracle so improbable it beggars the imagination.
- RHSman2 3y ago
  In the universe we inhabit, what does rare mean? I think we think it is rare but we have no concept of the scale of the possible interactions.
dotnet00 3y ago
That's the entire point of the fermi paradox. The reasonable assumption as with most things is that we aren't special, yet the data increasingly does not appear to reflect that. Unlike with detecting exoplanets, blaming our sensors only makes this discrepancy worse. Unless you're trying to make the argument that we haven't found life because we're looking for specifically Earth-like life, in which case I'd just say that it's more rational with our current technology to focus on the kind of life we definitely know can exist rather than hypothetical biochemstries we can't realistically test. It isn't even as if the conditions we're setting are especially extreme, a planet in a goldilocks zone of a relatively stable star with an atmosphere and signatures of water and potentially significant amounts of oxygen.
- defrost 3y ago
  The Fermi paradox assumes detection | communication is desirable | possible | recognisable by us. It relates to intelligent lifeforms that show themselves in ways we can recognise. It has little bearing on the question of life elsewhere - a starfish orbiting an exoplanet counts here. Fermi was a little naive on the "space is big | communication is hard" front - before the James Cook expeditions life existed in Australia and yet the British monarchy hadn't received a single missive by Royal Mail from any of the numerous nations within Australia. The methods of signalling long distances that we're aware of require focus and|or vast amounts of power and extremely long travel times; focus requires us to be targetted over a staggeringly large number of other solar systems, weilding vast amounts of power requires tech able to do so and not find other more efficient means, etc. Those communicating across galaxies are doing so in ways we do not yet recognise, those with civilisations that cause their own suns to give them away are yet to be found as we have barely starting looking at a fraction of all the systems there are out there - JWT is good but it's barely been up a day in cosmic terms and there's much left to look at.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  The Fermi paradox isn’t what I would point to. It makes a lot of assumptions. The rare earth hypothesis is much more rooted in first principles. The earth has a very rare combination of factors all of which are crucial to life as we know it, and likely anything we could recognize as life due to the factors life requires for maintaining its complexity and ability to self replicate and perpetuate. These are not limited to the specific nature of carbon, water, and oxygen in the Goldilocks zones, the necessity of a magnetosphere, in a very specific galactic structure in a specific part of such a galactic structure, making the specific envelope of Sol and earth with its unique tectonic geology, etc, all of which are literally necessary to evolve life. Other forms of life are theorized (silicon based, etc) but they have almost impossible requirements to assemble into structures complex enough with enough flow of energy without so much energy they fall apart. Every theorized xenobiology other than the one we have is likely impossible for pretty fundamental reasons. This doesn’t mean we have exhausted all possibilities or that nature won’t surprise us in crazy ways beyond our imagination, it just means life is almost certainly MUCH MUCH more rare than drakes equation lets on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis Again, I’m not saying life doesn’t exist outside earth. I’m saying we don’t know and despite really hard efforts to approach extraterrestrial life from every possible angle has been fruitless so far, even to the point we have no theories of life’s origins, how to detect life, and no open avenues that have any hope of such a discovery. At the moment it’s feeling less likely we will discover life outside the earth before we can reverse time (as we have done in simple time crystals). That should be daunting to our blind faith. To my mind this should weigh on us as a burden. As long as we believe life exists elsewhere the loss of life on earth is sad, but ultimately inconsequential. If we are the seed of life in the practically observable universe, then we are the shepherd of the most amazing thing in all of creation. We have a responsibility to tend it, and IMO, spread it as far and wide as we can such that the universe does team with life and for the rest of all time life never feels alone.