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This is intriguing and I’m very happy this exploration is being done. But, for decades, I’ve been reading reports of the discovery of evidence for the trapping

This is intriguing and I’m very happy this exploration is being done. But, for decades, I’ve been reading reports of the discovery of evidence for the trappings of life elsewhere: water and organics and “habitable” exoplanets. These are valuable discoveries, but the tone of the reports suggest they imply life is about to turn up. It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth. Moreover, no one has succeeded in hatching living matter from non living matter and we must honestly say we do not know how this process came about or the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur (despite much speculation, some of which may turn out to be correct but equally may turn out to be dead wrong). The oft cited fact that life arose “quickly” after the formation of Earth has no bearing on the question.

tshaddox 3y ago
> It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth. I’m curious how your epistemology is working here. It seems to me that this will also be true in the future if we have found life on a hundred other planets. There still won’t be a shred of evidence of life anywhere else, and we still won’t have the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur, right?
- ianai 3y ago
  idk, I think if we see even simple life at multiple points in our own system that we can increase our expectations for the prevalence of life very significantly. And of course given how vast and indifferent to life the universe is, life would still be vanishingly rare in the universe. It's going to be always precious and a gem.
  - superposeur 3y ago
    I agree, if — that’s an enormous “if”.
    - ianai 3y ago
      But it’s actually possible to explore our solar system! We’ve been at it since the 70s!
      - superposeur 3y ago
        Yes and I’m glad we’re doing it! No life or fossilized remains of life of any kind has yet been found.
        junofan 3y ago
        Have we sent up any archeological tools for sample prep and whatnot? Can’t find what we don’t look for, no?
        itishappy 3y ago
        Yup! We've sampled the Moon a number of times, and we're currently trying to figure out how to get one back from Mars... https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Why? That could just mean our solar gave rise to life and not earth alone. Still don’t see why that increases the odds outside of our solar system
    - itishappy 3y ago
      If it can spread between planets, it could conceivably spread between stars.
- superposeur 3y ago
  If, in a volume of space, there are N exoplanets and 100 spontaneously created life, then I’d crudely estimate the probability of life at 100/N for a given exoplanet. Currently, we have only an upper limit on the probability and barely even that. All observations are consistent with a probability less that 10^-40, meaning it certainly wouldn’t happen a second time in the observable universe.
  - spenczar5 3y ago
    How many exoplanets would you say we have proven have no life? You imply 10^40 exoplanets are known to harbor no life. That is probably vastly more than the number of planets in the observable universe (something in the wide region of 10^20 to 10^25). Something like 5,000 exoplanets have even been discovered. We can’t cross off many of those as certainly lacking life.
    - superposeur 3y ago
      I’m certainly not claiming the actual probability is 10^-40 , only using this as an example consistent with an upper limit, which probability would imply life has not arisen a second time in the observable universe. Actually this is way overkill — as you say, even if the probability is as high as 10^-25, life on Earth is still probably the only instance in observable universe. The point is that we have no idea what this all important parameter is.
      - spenczar5 3y ago
        Our upper limit is something like 10^-1. After all, there is life on earth! Our lower limit is 10^-25 or so. Why pick the lower limit? Existence of life on earth is extremely powerful evidence.
        superposeur 3y ago
        Ah, but in my opinion we can't call 10^-25 a lower limit since, if life didn't occur in this collection of planets, we wouldn't be here asking the question in the first place!
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  the epistemology rests on how you construct the question, and the underlying logic. "Does life exist anywhere besides earth" is a very different question than "does life exist outside these 100 planets". Because they are different questions, the relevancy of data and hypotheses are different.
- notjoemama 3y ago
  Using this same logic (in an ad absurdum context) we could also say you will never die because no one anywhere has any evidence that you have. That doesn’t falsify your statement, but using ad absurdum shows a statement is not true in every context. I tend to think that shows less conclusion and more investigation may be warranted. That’s how I think of it, but I could be off base and I’m open to being mostly if not entirely wrong.
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    We have pretty good explanations for why people die and why we expect everyone alive today to die unless we acquire new knowledge that enables us to prevent it.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  The God of the gaps.
FL33TW00D 3y ago
The lack of interest in abiogenesis in most circles is truly outstanding.
- ianai 3y ago
  And here’s another thing. With how difficult it is to probe new physics, we stand to do a lot more research by simply inspecting all the observable universe than trying to build colliders.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Finding a new particle doesn't necessarily threaten strictly up held religious beliefs like finding life somewhere other than this rock
    - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      Catholics officially believe in aliens, and that we should save them (if they weren’t visited by Jesus) Jews wouldn’t care either. Don’t know about Muslims, but it’s not threatening to the other Abrahamic religions
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Catholics officially believe in aliens, A definitive position on the existence of aliens is not part of the Catholic faith. But, the church admits the possibility and church institutions have done some explorations about what the implications of such contact might be, and how Catholic doctrine might apply to different possibilities.
        local_crmdgeon 3y ago
        Apparently you are correct! https://www.catholic.com/qa/whats-the-catholic-position-on-the-existence-of-extra-terrestrial-life https://www.catholic.com/qa/whats-the-catholic-position-on-t...
      - 3y ago
idlewords 3y ago
I would turn your logic around and say, everywhere we are able to look, we find evidence that life is more likely than expected. Until the 1990's it was an open question whether any other star had planets; as soon as we got the tools to test that, we found they were ubiquitous. As soon as we got the right instruments to Mars, we found signs of moving water, methane sources, and complex organic molecules in what is basically an Earth-like old lake bed. The moment PCR technology made it possible to do the search, we found a massive 'dark biome' extending many kilometers into the Earth's crust. When you immediately find strong pieces of circumstantial evidence the moment you acquire the tools to start looking for something, the correct conclusion to draw is not "we have yet to find a shred of evidence", but that further searching is likely to be highly worthwhile.
- superposeur 3y ago
  These factors are what I call the “trappings of life”. It is a completely open question (and I mean completely) how likely life is to arise spontaneously when these factors are present. One single instance of life elsewhere or successful abiogenesis in the lab would change that, but we have neither.
  - malfist 3y ago
    We've barely started looking. It's like picking up one piece of hay, not finding a needle and declaring there's no needle in the haystack.
    - superposeur 3y ago
      No is declaring that there is no needle in the haystack. Please actually read my post.
      - stouset 3y ago
        “I just want to be clear that we’ve definitely not actually found life. We’ve found likely precursors everywhere, habitable bodies everywhere, have plausible theories on how to go from precursors to bootstrapping, and see life in every corner of the planet we have explored. But just to be clear we haven’t actually found life anywhere else yet.” Yeah, we know. So what then was the point of your post?
henry2023 3y ago
The universe is 13 billion years old. Planet earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life on earth started 3.7 billion years ago. We sent our first radio wave just 125 years ago. Probably life is not than unusual and we just don’t have a way to verify this (yet).
- edgyquant 3y ago
  What is this probability based upon?
  - wredue 3y ago
    The probability is based on the fact that everywhere we look, we find building blocks of life, life started on earth basically as soon as it could have, life exists at all and is capable of asking said question, life is remarkably adaptable, we estimate billions of earth like planets just in our galaxy. I know that there is a burning desire to think we’re special, but the truth of the matter is that we’re almost definitely not.
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      We are the universe though. I.e. the universe has at least one mind (yours) and it thinks that it is special :)
- borissk 3y ago
  The three and a half facts you listed (life may have started earlier if it came to Earth from Mars or elsewhere) do not logically lead to your conclusion.
fzeindl 3y ago
I once heard: „The universe is unbelievably huge and unbelievably old so rare events happen all the time.“ I think it meant that even if life started itself accidentally by some unbelievably slim chance, this could happen somewhere else as well simply because the dice are rolled that often. I think time is the factor here. When you take into account not only the size of the universe but also it‘s age, the chance that life started somewhere, somewhen and ended long ago could be larger than zero, even if we are not able to calculate it.
- grupthink 3y ago
  All dimensions are a factor. Life could exist on different time-scales (e.g. it moves so slow we thought it was inanimate). It could exist on different physical-scales (be so large we don't realize we are a part of it). Or, it could exist on an entirely different plane of existence (on a desolate planet in a shard of silicon that is turing complete and quietly simulating its own recursive universe).
  - fzeindl 3y ago
    > be so large we don't realize we are a part of it While these are valid and interesting ideas from science fiction, I personally doubt that there's some fundamental property about human life that we haven't noticed yet, like some fundamental connection to other matter. Simply because there's no evidence that our primitive understanding about what is life, has fundamentally changed in history. I guess a few thousand years ago people understood that we, plants and animals are alive and rocks are not and we still think the same. (nature religions aside) So if there was no shift in understanding for such a long time, why should we now realize we are part of something a part from an eco system?
- onion2k 3y ago
  I think it meant that even if life started itself accidentally by some unbelievably slim chance, this could happen somewhere else as well simply because the dice are rolled that often. That might be true, but we have no basis the probability of how rare life is so we can't say it is. We may assume the probability is high enough that it happens often in trillions of chances, but if the probability is one in a quintillion then we're simply wrong. Humans are incredibly bad at thinking about both probability and thinking about large numbers, so when we combine the two we're likely to be quite wrong.
zvmaz 3y ago
> It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth. It is hard for me to believe that in the mind boggling vastness of space and time, we are the sole singularity in the history of the universe.
- hossbeast 3y ago
  Many things which are hard to believe are nevertheless true.
  - zvmaz 3y ago
    Sure, but in this case, we don't know.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  When Everest was first measured, it was exactly 29,000 feet. They figured no one would believe this, so they told people it was 29,002 feet Sometimes things just are, regardless of what we expect.
  - clevergadget 3y ago
    Waugh is sometimes playfully credited with being "the first person to put two feet on top of Mount Everest".
- chrisandchris 3y ago
  The "observable" universe is very small. We can take a look at things that are at the "ebd" of the universe, but those happened multiple billion years ago. Earth itself is 2-3 billion years old and life in terms of mammals is is a couple hundred million years old. So to say, there may be another earth with human-like life. But it's so far away, life isn't here (therefore not observable) and life may already be gone there (but it will take another billion years until we can observe it).
TheGRS 3y ago
Sure, I don’t think that’s lost on anyone. The headline of “life found outside earth” is going to be a big deal. But I also think we are zeroing in on the inevitable outcome. The math of probability and the simple components to life make it seem pretty likely we’ll get there unless there is something more fundamental that hasn’t been seen yet. We haven’t reproduced proto-life yet, but we also don’t have millions of years and a planet sized laboratory at our disposal.
- superposeur 3y ago
  Don't mean to pick on words, but your statement that "the math of probability and the simple components to life" makes life elsewhere an "inevitable outcome" proves my point that the dialogue around this topic is currently distorted. The probability of life arising from simple components is totally unknown. Equally likely, sparking life requires a combinatoric threading of a needle to the tune of 10^-25 even when all ingredients are gathered in proximity.
  - TheGRS 3y ago
    I prefer the glass half full view of possibility is all. No one has 100% certainty that life exists elsewhere, but its certainly higher than 0% certainty. For me this is nothing but a mental perspective. Historically we trended toward a very strict heliocentric view of the known universe, to the point that evidence was ignored. I would like to stay away from that side of scientific curiosity and keep wondering and exploring. It doesn't negate what you're saying at all, but its certainly more optimistic.
sigzero 3y ago
I happen to agree with you. I am in the "we are it" crowd but still agree with should explore.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  I am too - I think it’s the moon plus Jupiter that is extremely unique and makes complex life possible I also think it’s a lot of pressure if it’s only us, so it’s easier to imagine we’re one of billions. Honestly, honestly think it’s just us. Maybe not in the entire universe but in our local cluster.
swingingFlyFish 3y ago
"It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth" Dude considering we're barely scratching the surface of the scratch on the scratch of the surface, I'd say this is really arrogant. We haven't found anything because our universe is a haystack and we're looking for the quark of a needle in that haystack. Perspective.
- superposeur 3y ago
  This is true. It is also true that we have found “not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth”.
robofanatic 3y ago
But the other possibility that some intelligent super being created life on Earth is even bizarre. If that’s what you believe then who created that creator? You can go on and on, there is no end to this question. That very first creator must have come out from a “non living” thing.
- DennisP 3y ago
  Your parent comment isn't suggesting creationism, just pointing out that the beginning of life could be an astronomically rare event.
mcfig 3y ago
People are reacting negatively to your comment, the reason is that however accurate your complaint may be about most such reporting (IMO you are correct), you have chosen to attach it to this article. I find no evidence in this article of “tone implying life is about to turn up”. I think you have misread the tone. The article certainly has a tone of excitement throughout. But it’s excitement for further knowledge, in general. Of the possibility of life showing up elsewhere, it says only this: “Scientists are still a long way from answering whether life could originate on Enceladus”
- superposeur 3y ago
  Fair enough. On the other hand, to my ear the title "NASA finds life-sparking energy source and molecule" sets the tone, as though life was sparked, or that we even know could be sparked by the presence of these ingredients with some degree of confidence.
  - borissk 3y ago
    Life is much more than a mix of ingredients. A dead bacteria cell has all the ingredients needed for life, but is not alive.
  - mcfig 3y ago
    Good point, I had glossed over the title. That is definitely clickbait, “life-sparking” is not the same as “potential life precursor”. The rest of the article seems unusually restrained, though.
renewiltord 3y ago
Is it actually worth remembering? I don't know, man. It kind of sounds not worth remembering if I'm honest. It's kind of like telling us that there is not one single shred of evidence that artificial flight has ever existed or that exoplanets have ever existed or anything of the sort. Sure, that's the base case. It's not "worth remembering" at all. It's as much worth remembering as the fact that my clothes are in the dryer right now.
- superposeur 3y ago
  I think it's "worth remembering" precisely because it seems not to be the base case anymore! To see this, just look at all the expressions of confidence in life's ubiquity throughout the rest of this thread!
seanoliver 3y ago
Life almost certainly exists elsewhere in the universe (particularly if you consider that which is beyond what we define as ”observable”). As others have commented, it’s too large for it not to exist. However, it does seem extremely rare and could be so rare that it doesn't exist in the observable universe (it's almost certainly not in our Local Bubble). It is interesting to also think about the likelihood of "intelligent" life. Because while basic, simple organisms are bound to appear somewhere else considering the universe's vastness, the idea that they could develop this intelligence and self-awareness is another big leap that doesn't seem like it necessarily needs to happen wherever life is happening.
richardw 3y ago
We’re looking for the shreds of evidence. What would you prefer people do?
bvirb 3y ago
What a fun thread. I've always heard this as one of The Great Filters related to the Fermi paradox. FWIW the wikipedia for the Fermi paradox even mentions that: > The most commonly agreed-upon low probability event is abiogenesis ...which I read as saying that the most commonly agreed-upon reason we haven't found life anywhere else yet is because we _are_ special and abiogenesis is the rare event (the great filter). All the various great filter theories are pretty fun reading.
deleted 3y ago
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qqtt 3y ago
> Moreover, no one has succeeded in hatching living matter from non living matter and we must honestly say we do not know how this process came about or the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur (despite much speculation Just want to comment on this point. The research in this field is pretty esoteric. It doesn't really benefit us to understand how this process came about (ie, there is little practical gain here, no medical advancements or otherwise), and moreover it requires a simulation which can estimate behavior over hundreds of millions of years. The usefulness of cracking the early earth/life creation part of our history is really not immediately clear, and thus research is limited. That said, the Miller-Urey experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment) showed animo acids organizing over conditions similar to early earth, and a follow up experiment dubbed Planet Simulator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Simulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Simulator) was extended to show the organization of protocells as part of this early earth environment. It seems only a matter of time before science can connect the dots along the rest of the hundreds of millions of years regarding this process to show the line between chemical young earth evolving to be biological. As an aside, why do you think it is "important to remember" that we haven't found life or that we don't fully understand the process by which biology evolved from chemistry? Why exactly is it "important to remember" such things?
- superposeur 3y ago
  It is “important to remember” precisely because these days people are not remembering this and speak with a sense of inevitability about discovering life elsewhere, which sense of inevitability is totally unsupported. I may gently point out, your own post says “it is only a matter of time before science can connect the dots”, reflecting this (in my view) distorted sense. The abiogenesis research you cite is absolutely worthwhile, but it is not even clear if it is in the right direction and certainly far, far from successfully sparking the sustained chain reaction of life. To my eye, equally consistent (as some different research may suggest) is that a combinatorial needle must be threaded to the tune of p < 10^-23 per exoplanet, making it unlikely to happen again in our observable universe. Edit: to cite just the one “combinatorial abiogenesis” reference, see for instance https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0
ryanSrich 3y ago
The math is the evidence. The math is not in your naysaying favor.
- verisimi 3y ago
  I can't even conceive what evidence maths could provide!
mdavidn 3y ago
What you say is true, but thinking of ourselves as the only life feels like hubris. It reminds me of geocentrism.
troyvit 3y ago
Personally I think articles like this are actually the shreds of evidence you say don't exist. If there isn't life on Enceladus this is still incredibly exciting because then it might make the perfect lab for us to put life and study how it evolves.
nescioquid 3y ago
I think you enjoy the top comment for the phrase >> It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth. There is nothing like the blunt expanse of a simple fact to sharpen the mind. If the consequent should be that, based on the evidence we are alone and therefore first, I postulate an obligation to seed the cult of Apollo throughout the universe -- the god of the one thing without which life itself would be a mistake. I leave it to HN to fuck up the answer.
verisimi 3y ago
What you are touching upon, imo, is the idea that science is NOT actually some independent, objective means of understanding the world, in contrast to religious thinking. Whereas the reality is that science is actually a belief based system, that cloaks itself in a (thin) veneer of objectivity. The scientific method is venerated but not applied personally. So, the reality is that adherents accept a reality intermediated for them by priests/scientists (and journals, trusted sources). Adherents talk about truth/reality while having little or no personal experience of the matter at hand. It is group behaviour, evidence is paid lip service to but there is very little critical thought or assessment of said 'evidence' by any individual adherents. When the scientific authorities make a pronouncement, this is simply accepted. Religion. Believers.
berniedurfee 3y ago
But we barely know anything about how life on our own works, much less came about. We barely know anything concrete about anything. We’re just hairless (mostly) apes running amok having discovered how to trap fire inside little bits of copper and sand. We’ll look as primitive to our descendants in 10,000 years as our ancestors of 10,000 years look to us. I guess I’m saying that, I think, our views on the universe and life are only very slightly more accurate than they were when those ancestors were painting what they saw in caves. I think our hubris tells us we understand far more than we do. I think if you take that into account, the possibility for life existing elsewhere in the universe is an absolute fact. I surmise, that for us to think that we’re the only sentient life in the unimaginably vast universe is the ultimate manifestation of our drive for self-preservation. We want to survive and propagate our DNA above all else, therefor we must be vigilant against all threats, therefor if we consider ourselves at the center of the universe, we can be sure to never neglect anything that might indeed be a threat. The problem with this instinct is that it clouds our conscious judgement into thinking that the universe does indeed revolve around us and then we make conclusions according to that fallacy. I think life in the universe is as ubiquitous as rocks. It’s everywhere in all manner of forms and sophistication. We just won’t have the tools to see or hear it for maybe a couple hundred years or so. But once we do, we’ll have a chuckle at how we could be so arrogant as a species to ever think we were alone.
consumer451 3y ago
> But, for decades, I’ve been reading reports of the discovery of evidence for the trappings of life elsewhere: water and organics and “habitable” exoplanets. These are valuable discoveries, but the tone of the reports suggest they imply life is about to turn up. I agree that life is not very likely. We appear to have gotten lucky. Aka, “the rare earth hypothesis.” As far as habitable zones, both Mars and Venus are in the habitable zone of our solar system, and they appear to be barren. But do not despair! A new approach has been identified. Look much wider and farther, and as opposed to biosignatures, we should look for signs of technosignatures. This would be much harder to mistake for natural chemical processes. Choza et al. (2023; breakthrough listen search for extra-galactic technosignatures) - https://seti.berkeley.edu/galaxies/choza.pdf https://seti.berkeley.edu/galaxies/choza.pdf https://youtu.be/2RQWiJ0x_R4?t=121 https://youtu.be/2RQWiJ0x_R4?t=121 Technosignatures in general seem to be a good idea to satiate our curiosity. https://youtu.be/BtSn_PTQtds?t=1966 https://youtu.be/BtSn_PTQtds?t=1966

tshaddox 3y ago

> It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth. I’m curious how your epistemology is working here. It seems to me that this will also be true in the future if we have found life on a hundred other planets. There still won’t be a shred of evidence of life anywhere else, and we still won’t have the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur, right?

ianai 3y ago
idk, I think if we see even simple life at multiple points in our own system that we can increase our expectations for the prevalence of life very significantly. And of course given how vast and indifferent to life the universe is, life would still be vanishingly rare in the universe. It's going to be always precious and a gem.
- superposeur 3y ago
  I agree, if — that’s an enormous “if”.
  - ianai 3y ago
    But it’s actually possible to explore our solar system! We’ve been at it since the 70s!
    - superposeur 3y ago
      Yes and I’m glad we’re doing it! No life or fossilized remains of life of any kind has yet been found.
      - junofan 3y ago
        Have we sent up any archeological tools for sample prep and whatnot? Can’t find what we don’t look for, no?
        itishappy 3y ago
        Yup! We've sampled the Moon a number of times, and we're currently trying to figure out how to get one back from Mars... https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Why? That could just mean our solar gave rise to life and not earth alone. Still don’t see why that increases the odds outside of our solar system
  - itishappy 3y ago
    If it can spread between planets, it could conceivably spread between stars.
superposeur 3y ago
If, in a volume of space, there are N exoplanets and 100 spontaneously created life, then I’d crudely estimate the probability of life at 100/N for a given exoplanet. Currently, we have only an upper limit on the probability and barely even that. All observations are consistent with a probability less that 10^-40, meaning it certainly wouldn’t happen a second time in the observable universe.
- spenczar5 3y ago
  How many exoplanets would you say we have proven have no life? You imply 10^40 exoplanets are known to harbor no life. That is probably vastly more than the number of planets in the observable universe (something in the wide region of 10^20 to 10^25). Something like 5,000 exoplanets have even been discovered. We can’t cross off many of those as certainly lacking life.
  - superposeur 3y ago
    I’m certainly not claiming the actual probability is 10^-40 , only using this as an example consistent with an upper limit, which probability would imply life has not arisen a second time in the observable universe. Actually this is way overkill — as you say, even if the probability is as high as 10^-25, life on Earth is still probably the only instance in observable universe. The point is that we have no idea what this all important parameter is.
    - spenczar5 3y ago
      Our upper limit is something like 10^-1. After all, there is life on earth! Our lower limit is 10^-25 or so. Why pick the lower limit? Existence of life on earth is extremely powerful evidence.
      - superposeur 3y ago
        Ah, but in my opinion we can't call 10^-25 a lower limit since, if life didn't occur in this collection of planets, we wouldn't be here asking the question in the first place!
s1artibartfast 3y ago
the epistemology rests on how you construct the question, and the underlying logic. "Does life exist anywhere besides earth" is a very different question than "does life exist outside these 100 planets". Because they are different questions, the relevancy of data and hypotheses are different.
notjoemama 3y ago
Using this same logic (in an ad absurdum context) we could also say you will never die because no one anywhere has any evidence that you have. That doesn’t falsify your statement, but using ad absurdum shows a statement is not true in every context. I tend to think that shows less conclusion and more investigation may be warranted. That’s how I think of it, but I could be off base and I’m open to being mostly if not entirely wrong.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  We have pretty good explanations for why people die and why we expect everyone alive today to die unless we acquire new knowledge that enables us to prevent it.
mvdtnz 3y ago
The God of the gaps.

FL33TW00D 3y ago

The lack of interest in abiogenesis in most circles is truly outstanding.

ianai 3y ago
And here’s another thing. With how difficult it is to probe new physics, we stand to do a lot more research by simply inspecting all the observable universe than trying to build colliders.
- dylan604 3y ago
  Finding a new particle doesn't necessarily threaten strictly up held religious beliefs like finding life somewhere other than this rock
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    Catholics officially believe in aliens, and that we should save them (if they weren’t visited by Jesus) Jews wouldn’t care either. Don’t know about Muslims, but it’s not threatening to the other Abrahamic religions
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Catholics officially believe in aliens, A definitive position on the existence of aliens is not part of the Catholic faith. But, the church admits the possibility and church institutions have done some explorations about what the implications of such contact might be, and how Catholic doctrine might apply to different possibilities.
      - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
        Apparently you are correct! https://www.catholic.com/qa/whats-the-catholic-position-on-the-existence-of-extra-terrestrial-life https://www.catholic.com/qa/whats-the-catholic-position-on-t...
    - 3y ago

idlewords 3y ago

I would turn your logic around and say, everywhere we are able to look, we find evidence that life is more likely than expected. Until the 1990's it was an open question whether any other star had planets; as soon as we got the tools to test that, we found they were ubiquitous. As soon as we got the right instruments to Mars, we found signs of moving water, methane sources, and complex organic molecules in what is basically an Earth-like old lake bed. The moment PCR technology made it possible to do the search, we found a massive 'dark biome' extending many kilometers into the Earth's crust. When you immediately find strong pieces of circumstantial evidence the moment you acquire the tools to start looking for something, the correct conclusion to draw is not "we have yet to find a shred of evidence", but that further searching is likely to be highly worthwhile.

superposeur 3y ago
These factors are what I call the “trappings of life”. It is a completely open question (and I mean completely) how likely life is to arise spontaneously when these factors are present. One single instance of life elsewhere or successful abiogenesis in the lab would change that, but we have neither.
- malfist 3y ago
  We've barely started looking. It's like picking up one piece of hay, not finding a needle and declaring there's no needle in the haystack.
  - superposeur 3y ago
    No is declaring that there is no needle in the haystack. Please actually read my post.
    - stouset 3y ago
      “I just want to be clear that we’ve definitely not actually found life. We’ve found likely precursors everywhere, habitable bodies everywhere, have plausible theories on how to go from precursors to bootstrapping, and see life in every corner of the planet we have explored. But just to be clear we haven’t actually found life anywhere else yet.” Yeah, we know. So what then was the point of your post?

henry2023 3y ago

The universe is 13 billion years old. Planet earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life on earth started 3.7 billion years ago. We sent our first radio wave just 125 years ago. Probably life is not than unusual and we just don’t have a way to verify this (yet).

edgyquant 3y ago
What is this probability based upon?
- wredue 3y ago
  The probability is based on the fact that everywhere we look, we find building blocks of life, life started on earth basically as soon as it could have, life exists at all and is capable of asking said question, life is remarkably adaptable, we estimate billions of earth like planets just in our galaxy. I know that there is a burning desire to think we’re special, but the truth of the matter is that we’re almost definitely not.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    We are the universe though. I.e. the universe has at least one mind (yours) and it thinks that it is special :)
borissk 3y ago
The three and a half facts you listed (life may have started earlier if it came to Earth from Mars or elsewhere) do not logically lead to your conclusion.

fzeindl 3y ago

I once heard: „The universe is unbelievably huge and unbelievably old so rare events happen all the time.“ I think it meant that even if life started itself accidentally by some unbelievably slim chance, this could happen somewhere else as well simply because the dice are rolled that often. I think time is the factor here. When you take into account not only the size of the universe but also it‘s age, the chance that life started somewhere, somewhen and ended long ago could be larger than zero, even if we are not able to calculate it.

grupthink 3y ago
All dimensions are a factor. Life could exist on different time-scales (e.g. it moves so slow we thought it was inanimate). It could exist on different physical-scales (be so large we don't realize we are a part of it). Or, it could exist on an entirely different plane of existence (on a desolate planet in a shard of silicon that is turing complete and quietly simulating its own recursive universe).
- fzeindl 3y ago
  > be so large we don't realize we are a part of it While these are valid and interesting ideas from science fiction, I personally doubt that there's some fundamental property about human life that we haven't noticed yet, like some fundamental connection to other matter. Simply because there's no evidence that our primitive understanding about what is life, has fundamentally changed in history. I guess a few thousand years ago people understood that we, plants and animals are alive and rocks are not and we still think the same. (nature religions aside) So if there was no shift in understanding for such a long time, why should we now realize we are part of something a part from an eco system?
onion2k 3y ago
I think it meant that even if life started itself accidentally by some unbelievably slim chance, this could happen somewhere else as well simply because the dice are rolled that often. That might be true, but we have no basis the probability of how rare life is so we can't say it is. We may assume the probability is high enough that it happens often in trillions of chances, but if the probability is one in a quintillion then we're simply wrong. Humans are incredibly bad at thinking about both probability and thinking about large numbers, so when we combine the two we're likely to be quite wrong.

zvmaz 3y ago

> It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth. It is hard for me to believe that in the mind boggling vastness of space and time, we are the sole singularity in the history of the universe.

hossbeast 3y ago
Many things which are hard to believe are nevertheless true.
- zvmaz 3y ago
  Sure, but in this case, we don't know.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
When Everest was first measured, it was exactly 29,000 feet. They figured no one would believe this, so they told people it was 29,002 feet Sometimes things just are, regardless of what we expect.
- clevergadget 3y ago
  Waugh is sometimes playfully credited with being "the first person to put two feet on top of Mount Everest".
chrisandchris 3y ago
The "observable" universe is very small. We can take a look at things that are at the "ebd" of the universe, but those happened multiple billion years ago. Earth itself is 2-3 billion years old and life in terms of mammals is is a couple hundred million years old. So to say, there may be another earth with human-like life. But it's so far away, life isn't here (therefore not observable) and life may already be gone there (but it will take another billion years until we can observe it).

TheGRS 3y ago

Sure, I don’t think that’s lost on anyone. The headline of “life found outside earth” is going to be a big deal. But I also think we are zeroing in on the inevitable outcome. The math of probability and the simple components to life make it seem pretty likely we’ll get there unless there is something more fundamental that hasn’t been seen yet. We haven’t reproduced proto-life yet, but we also don’t have millions of years and a planet sized laboratory at our disposal.

superposeur 3y ago
Don't mean to pick on words, but your statement that "the math of probability and the simple components to life" makes life elsewhere an "inevitable outcome" proves my point that the dialogue around this topic is currently distorted. The probability of life arising from simple components is totally unknown. Equally likely, sparking life requires a combinatoric threading of a needle to the tune of 10^-25 even when all ingredients are gathered in proximity.
- TheGRS 3y ago
  I prefer the glass half full view of possibility is all. No one has 100% certainty that life exists elsewhere, but its certainly higher than 0% certainty. For me this is nothing but a mental perspective. Historically we trended toward a very strict heliocentric view of the known universe, to the point that evidence was ignored. I would like to stay away from that side of scientific curiosity and keep wondering and exploring. It doesn't negate what you're saying at all, but its certainly more optimistic.

sigzero 3y ago

I happen to agree with you. I am in the "we are it" crowd but still agree with should explore.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago
I am too - I think it’s the moon plus Jupiter that is extremely unique and makes complex life possible I also think it’s a lot of pressure if it’s only us, so it’s easier to imagine we’re one of billions. Honestly, honestly think it’s just us. Maybe not in the entire universe but in our local cluster.

swingingFlyFish 3y ago

"It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth" Dude considering we're barely scratching the surface of the scratch on the scratch of the surface, I'd say this is really arrogant. We haven't found anything because our universe is a haystack and we're looking for the quark of a needle in that haystack. Perspective.

superposeur 3y ago
This is true. It is also true that we have found “not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth”.

robofanatic 3y ago

But the other possibility that some intelligent super being created life on Earth is even bizarre. If that’s what you believe then who created that creator? You can go on and on, there is no end to this question. That very first creator must have come out from a “non living” thing.

DennisP 3y ago
Your parent comment isn't suggesting creationism, just pointing out that the beginning of life could be an astronomically rare event.

mcfig 3y ago

People are reacting negatively to your comment, the reason is that however accurate your complaint may be about most such reporting (IMO you are correct), you have chosen to attach it to this article. I find no evidence in this article of “tone implying life is about to turn up”. I think you have misread the tone. The article certainly has a tone of excitement throughout. But it’s excitement for further knowledge, in general. Of the possibility of life showing up elsewhere, it says only this: “Scientists are still a long way from answering whether life could originate on Enceladus”

superposeur 3y ago
Fair enough. On the other hand, to my ear the title "NASA finds life-sparking energy source and molecule" sets the tone, as though life was sparked, or that we even know could be sparked by the presence of these ingredients with some degree of confidence.
- borissk 3y ago
  Life is much more than a mix of ingredients. A dead bacteria cell has all the ingredients needed for life, but is not alive.
- mcfig 3y ago
  Good point, I had glossed over the title. That is definitely clickbait, “life-sparking” is not the same as “potential life precursor”. The rest of the article seems unusually restrained, though.

renewiltord 3y ago

Is it actually worth remembering? I don't know, man. It kind of sounds not worth remembering if I'm honest. It's kind of like telling us that there is not one single shred of evidence that artificial flight has ever existed or that exoplanets have ever existed or anything of the sort. Sure, that's the base case. It's not "worth remembering" at all. It's as much worth remembering as the fact that my clothes are in the dryer right now.

superposeur 3y ago
I think it's "worth remembering" precisely because it seems not to be the base case anymore! To see this, just look at all the expressions of confidence in life's ubiquity throughout the rest of this thread!

seanoliver 3y ago

Life almost certainly exists elsewhere in the universe (particularly if you consider that which is beyond what we define as ”observable”). As others have commented, it’s too large for it not to exist. However, it does seem extremely rare and could be so rare that it doesn't exist in the observable universe (it's almost certainly not in our Local Bubble). It is interesting to also think about the likelihood of "intelligent" life. Because while basic, simple organisms are bound to appear somewhere else considering the universe's vastness, the idea that they could develop this intelligence and self-awareness is another big leap that doesn't seem like it necessarily needs to happen wherever life is happening.

richardw 3y ago

We’re looking for the shreds of evidence. What would you prefer people do?

bvirb 3y ago

What a fun thread. I've always heard this as one of The Great Filters related to the Fermi paradox. FWIW the wikipedia for the Fermi paradox even mentions that: > The most commonly agreed-upon low probability event is abiogenesis ...which I read as saying that the most commonly agreed-upon reason we haven't found life anywhere else yet is because we _are_ special and abiogenesis is the rare event (the great filter). All the various great filter theories are pretty fun reading.

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qqtt 3y ago

> Moreover, no one has succeeded in hatching living matter from non living matter and we must honestly say we do not know how this process came about or the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur (despite much speculation Just want to comment on this point. The research in this field is pretty esoteric. It doesn't really benefit us to understand how this process came about (ie, there is little practical gain here, no medical advancements or otherwise), and moreover it requires a simulation which can estimate behavior over hundreds of millions of years. The usefulness of cracking the early earth/life creation part of our history is really not immediately clear, and thus research is limited. That said, the Miller-Urey experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment) showed animo acids organizing over conditions similar to early earth, and a follow up experiment dubbed Planet Simulator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Simulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Simulator) was extended to show the organization of protocells as part of this early earth environment. It seems only a matter of time before science can connect the dots along the rest of the hundreds of millions of years regarding this process to show the line between chemical young earth evolving to be biological. As an aside, why do you think it is "important to remember" that we haven't found life or that we don't fully understand the process by which biology evolved from chemistry? Why exactly is it "important to remember" such things?

superposeur 3y ago
It is “important to remember” precisely because these days people are not remembering this and speak with a sense of inevitability about discovering life elsewhere, which sense of inevitability is totally unsupported. I may gently point out, your own post says “it is only a matter of time before science can connect the dots”, reflecting this (in my view) distorted sense. The abiogenesis research you cite is absolutely worthwhile, but it is not even clear if it is in the right direction and certainly far, far from successfully sparking the sustained chain reaction of life. To my eye, equally consistent (as some different research may suggest) is that a combinatorial needle must be threaded to the tune of p < 10^-23 per exoplanet, making it unlikely to happen again in our observable universe. Edit: to cite just the one “combinatorial abiogenesis” reference, see for instance https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0

ryanSrich 3y ago

The math is the evidence. The math is not in your naysaying favor.

verisimi 3y ago
I can't even conceive what evidence maths could provide!

mdavidn 3y ago

What you say is true, but thinking of ourselves as the only life feels like hubris. It reminds me of geocentrism.

troyvit 3y ago

Personally I think articles like this are actually the shreds of evidence you say don't exist. If there isn't life on Enceladus this is still incredibly exciting because then it might make the perfect lab for us to put life and study how it evolves.

nescioquid 3y ago

I think you enjoy the top comment for the phrase >> It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth. There is nothing like the blunt expanse of a simple fact to sharpen the mind. If the consequent should be that, based on the evidence we are alone and therefore first, I postulate an obligation to seed the cult of Apollo throughout the universe -- the god of the one thing without which life itself would be a mistake. I leave it to HN to fuck up the answer.

verisimi 3y ago

What you are touching upon, imo, is the idea that science is NOT actually some independent, objective means of understanding the world, in contrast to religious thinking. Whereas the reality is that science is actually a belief based system, that cloaks itself in a (thin) veneer of objectivity. The scientific method is venerated but not applied personally. So, the reality is that adherents accept a reality intermediated for them by priests/scientists (and journals, trusted sources). Adherents talk about truth/reality while having little or no personal experience of the matter at hand. It is group behaviour, evidence is paid lip service to but there is very little critical thought or assessment of said 'evidence' by any individual adherents. When the scientific authorities make a pronouncement, this is simply accepted. Religion. Believers.

berniedurfee 3y ago

But we barely know anything about how life on our own works, much less came about. We barely know anything concrete about anything. We’re just hairless (mostly) apes running amok having discovered how to trap fire inside little bits of copper and sand. We’ll look as primitive to our descendants in 10,000 years as our ancestors of 10,000 years look to us. I guess I’m saying that, I think, our views on the universe and life are only very slightly more accurate than they were when those ancestors were painting what they saw in caves. I think our hubris tells us we understand far more than we do. I think if you take that into account, the possibility for life existing elsewhere in the universe is an absolute fact. I surmise, that for us to think that we’re the only sentient life in the unimaginably vast universe is the ultimate manifestation of our drive for self-preservation. We want to survive and propagate our DNA above all else, therefor we must be vigilant against all threats, therefor if we consider ourselves at the center of the universe, we can be sure to never neglect anything that might indeed be a threat. The problem with this instinct is that it clouds our conscious judgement into thinking that the universe does indeed revolve around us and then we make conclusions according to that fallacy. I think life in the universe is as ubiquitous as rocks. It’s everywhere in all manner of forms and sophistication. We just won’t have the tools to see or hear it for maybe a couple hundred years or so. But once we do, we’ll have a chuckle at how we could be so arrogant as a species to ever think we were alone.

consumer451 3y ago

> But, for decades, I’ve been reading reports of the discovery of evidence for the trappings of life elsewhere: water and organics and “habitable” exoplanets. These are valuable discoveries, but the tone of the reports suggest they imply life is about to turn up. I agree that life is not very likely. We appear to have gotten lucky. Aka, “the rare earth hypothesis.” As far as habitable zones, both Mars and Venus are in the habitable zone of our solar system, and they appear to be barren. But do not despair! A new approach has been identified. Look much wider and farther, and as opposed to biosignatures, we should look for signs of technosignatures. This would be much harder to mistake for natural chemical processes. Choza et al. (2023; breakthrough listen search for extra-galactic technosignatures) - https://seti.berkeley.edu/galaxies/choza.pdf https://seti.berkeley.edu/galaxies/choza.pdf https://youtu.be/2RQWiJ0x_R4?t=121 https://youtu.be/2RQWiJ0x_R4?t=121 Technosignatures in general seem to be a good idea to satiate our curiosity. https://youtu.be/BtSn_PTQtds?t=1966 https://youtu.be/BtSn_PTQtds?t=1966