3 ms·

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 appea

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

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.