7 ms·

Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise. What's also implausible is that, given the impossible vast

by kibwen 3y ago

Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise. What's also implausible is that, given the impossible vastness and hostility of interstellar space, that any will ever manage to contact us, specifically. Fortunately, we've got lots of crazy lifeforms here on Earth to keep us occupied, if we can take a moment to stop extincting them as fast as we possibly can.

nyokodo 3y ago
> Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise. I'll grant you that once we have found a single other planet with life. Until then we're doing statistics on a single data point and no, the number of planets and galaxies etc are not sufficient to statistically determine the prevalence of life because as yet none of them are confirmed to have life. This is wishful thinking and statistical truthiness.
- xandrius 3y ago
  This is only true if we believe Earth is special, which we have no bases. So I'll stick to statistics for now, thank you very much.
  - mr_mitm 3y ago
    Statistics is a very precise science. Can you show your work or is it just a gut feeling?
    - xandrius 3y ago
      I know nothing compared to people who work in the field, so I don't have my own work, I trust theirs.
      - mr_mitm 3y ago
        Whose work exactly? I'm always eager to read about this fascinating question.
    - the_af 3y ago
      > Statistics is a very precise science. Can you show your work or is it just a gut feeling? In my case, my gut feeling, but is it so unlikely? As mentioned in "Cosmos: Possible Worlds", planets may go through a "habitable zone", which is the window in which they are just the right distance from just the right star, and they have the right elements in their surface or whatnot. And then just the right random events have to happen and there's the spark of life. And then a gazillion extinction events must be averted, at times when the Tree of Life (to use the metaphor from Cosmos) is at its most fragile, when all of life could be cut down before its prime. It sounds unlikely for any single planet, any single star system, any single galaxy, etc. But on the grand scale of the universe, it cannot be that nowhere else but here on Earth did this happen. I don't know if this is statistics. It surely is gut feeling. But I think it's the right kind of gut feeling...
      - nyokodo 3y ago
        > it cannot be that nowhere else but here on Earth did this happen. > I don't know if this is statistics. It surely is gut feeling. It's possible that life emerging is so unlikely that it has never happened before anywhere even if it could happen again. We do not have the data to establish how likely and in fact we don't even have enough data to fill in all the gaps of how life on earth emerged in the first place. Our gut feelings are likely heavily influenced by science fiction or other priors and can't be trusted for knowledge but we are as a species very good at deluding ourselves into thinking we know things that we don't.
        the_af 3y ago
        But that's it. Life doesn't seem so unlikely, does it? There are things we still don't understand about it, but we understand some, and it's not magic. It can happen, given the right conditions, much like mold may grow on a piece of bread under the right conditions. What's difficult to comprehend is the immense vastness of the universe. It seems unlikely that nowhere else did the preconditions for life arise, and in fact, it seems likely that they must have arisen in multiple places. Immensely many places, in fact. Considered like that, it's more unlikely that life didn't appear anywhere else but in this Pale Blue Dot. We look at our planet, and all that had to happen for those first lifeforms to come into existence, and it seems so unlikely... but not impossible. And we're playing with a lot of dice here! Very hard not to roll a few sixes with a bag of dice so large.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    If you're sticking to statistics, the right answer is we don't know enough. The general rule of thumb I've seen is that you want to see n * p >= ~20 to be able to accurately assess the probability. For the difficulty of evolution of life, we have a total N of 1-5 of life-could-have-evolved, depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you want to be about life's chances (could life have evolved on Venus? Mars? Titan? Europa? any other moons I'm forgetting about). At this point, the statistics says more about your priors than they do about actual data, since there's not enough data to actually do any statistics on.
  - terryf 3y ago
    Why does that make the earth special? Is the single one in a million dimensional one-hot vector special? Why? If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random. Just the other random values don't get to ask the question...
    - the_af 3y ago
      > If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random "It was random" in my opinion explains little. If it was sentient, maybe the dice would say "why did I land showing my '6' face? Why me?" and the answer would be many other dice landed showing their '6' faces. Random, but given enough dice rolling you'll get another '6'. The universe is finite but it's mind-boggingly large. I think Earth is special because a- I was born there, enough said, and b- it has just the right conditions and luck for life to exist. But I don't think it's so special that it's the only planet in the whole mind-boggingly large universe to be this way. There must be other planets/dice rolling out there. Until we find another such planet we cannot know for certain, but in my opinion it seems unlikely that these conditions don't exist anywhere else but on Earth. Why? Well, because the universe is so large -- the dice pool is very, very large.
travisjungroth 3y ago
I do think there’s other life out there. But just considering the other side, the statistical model only applies if the existence of life is actually stochastic. If a farmer plants a single tree in the middle of a square mile plot and rips up anything else that grows, any Fermi approximations done by the tree are going to be quite misleading.
- xandrius 3y ago
  Who's this galactic farmer you're talking about?
  - travisjungroth 3y ago
    One or more beings with power and intelligence many orders of magnitude higher than our own. To call it god or gods gives a religious tone to it that totally derails the discussion and I’m specifically avoiding. This isn’t about going to church on Sundays. There are a few answers to the “Where are they?” question. One is that the parameters to the Drake equation mean life is so rare we actually are alone (as another commenter linked to). Another group of answers is that there is life, but something about the relationship between us means we don’t observe them. Maybe they’re hiding from us. Maybe they’re hiding from everyone. I think the range of possible answers that people think of for this scenario is generally much too narrow. The power imbalances can be wildly greater than “they’re avoiding us”. We experience power imbalances this large every day. What’s the relationship between a Petri dish of bacteria and a person? Imagine a culture of penicillin reasoning how it came to be. Maybe this universe is a total construction. Maybe it’s partially constructed, in the same way a farmer “makes” a farm from the Earth. If anything like that is the case, stochastic models are completely the wrong way to reason. It would be like if I wove a basket. There’s now at least one basket made by Travis Jungroth. Surely there must be more? Out of the millions of baskets made across time, what’s the probability that only one was made by me? Even for a low probability of any individual basket, the numbers start getting decent there’s another out there. But there’s not. I just… decided to make only one.
    - zolland 3y ago
mr_mitm 3y ago
First of all: the question needs to be qualified by what we mean by "out there". The galaxy? The observable universe? The entire universe? The universe might be infinite, in which case: yes, there is life out there. We know the probably of life forming on any given planet must be greater than zero, or else we wouldn't be here. From this we can deduce the average volume which contains exactly one planet with life, which must be finite. Whether it makes sense to talk about what could be happening beyond the cosmological event horizon is another discussion. If we are talking about the observable universe or an even smaller volume: How can you say it's statistically implausible without knowing the probability of life forming on any given planet? It might be incredibly small, yet greater than zero. Your line of reasoning is incredibly common but I can't help but feel like it's mainly driven by wishful thinking.
- phantompeace 3y ago
  Probably extrapolating from the fact that life here on Earth being found in harsh conditions, and those conditions being likely to be found all over the universe.
floxy 3y ago
"Dissolving the Fermi Paradox" https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

by kibwen 3y ago

nyokodo 3y ago

> Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise. I'll grant you that once we have found a single other planet with life. Until then we're doing statistics on a single data point and no, the number of planets and galaxies etc are not sufficient to statistically determine the prevalence of life because as yet none of them are confirmed to have life. This is wishful thinking and statistical truthiness.

xandrius 3y ago
This is only true if we believe Earth is special, which we have no bases. So I'll stick to statistics for now, thank you very much.
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  Statistics is a very precise science. Can you show your work or is it just a gut feeling?
  - xandrius 3y ago
    I know nothing compared to people who work in the field, so I don't have my own work, I trust theirs.
    - mr_mitm 3y ago
      Whose work exactly? I'm always eager to read about this fascinating question.
  - the_af 3y ago
    > Statistics is a very precise science. Can you show your work or is it just a gut feeling? In my case, my gut feeling, but is it so unlikely? As mentioned in "Cosmos: Possible Worlds", planets may go through a "habitable zone", which is the window in which they are just the right distance from just the right star, and they have the right elements in their surface or whatnot. And then just the right random events have to happen and there's the spark of life. And then a gazillion extinction events must be averted, at times when the Tree of Life (to use the metaphor from Cosmos) is at its most fragile, when all of life could be cut down before its prime. It sounds unlikely for any single planet, any single star system, any single galaxy, etc. But on the grand scale of the universe, it cannot be that nowhere else but here on Earth did this happen. I don't know if this is statistics. It surely is gut feeling. But I think it's the right kind of gut feeling...
    - nyokodo 3y ago
      > it cannot be that nowhere else but here on Earth did this happen. > I don't know if this is statistics. It surely is gut feeling. It's possible that life emerging is so unlikely that it has never happened before anywhere even if it could happen again. We do not have the data to establish how likely and in fact we don't even have enough data to fill in all the gaps of how life on earth emerged in the first place. Our gut feelings are likely heavily influenced by science fiction or other priors and can't be trusted for knowledge but we are as a species very good at deluding ourselves into thinking we know things that we don't.
      - the_af 3y ago
        But that's it. Life doesn't seem so unlikely, does it? There are things we still don't understand about it, but we understand some, and it's not magic. It can happen, given the right conditions, much like mold may grow on a piece of bread under the right conditions. What's difficult to comprehend is the immense vastness of the universe. It seems unlikely that nowhere else did the preconditions for life arise, and in fact, it seems likely that they must have arisen in multiple places. Immensely many places, in fact. Considered like that, it's more unlikely that life didn't appear anywhere else but in this Pale Blue Dot. We look at our planet, and all that had to happen for those first lifeforms to come into existence, and it seems so unlikely... but not impossible. And we're playing with a lot of dice here! Very hard not to roll a few sixes with a bag of dice so large.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  If you're sticking to statistics, the right answer is we don't know enough. The general rule of thumb I've seen is that you want to see n * p >= ~20 to be able to accurately assess the probability. For the difficulty of evolution of life, we have a total N of 1-5 of life-could-have-evolved, depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you want to be about life's chances (could life have evolved on Venus? Mars? Titan? Europa? any other moons I'm forgetting about). At this point, the statistics says more about your priors than they do about actual data, since there's not enough data to actually do any statistics on.
- terryf 3y ago
  Why does that make the earth special? Is the single one in a million dimensional one-hot vector special? Why? If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random. Just the other random values don't get to ask the question...
  - the_af 3y ago
    > If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random "It was random" in my opinion explains little. If it was sentient, maybe the dice would say "why did I land showing my '6' face? Why me?" and the answer would be many other dice landed showing their '6' faces. Random, but given enough dice rolling you'll get another '6'. The universe is finite but it's mind-boggingly large. I think Earth is special because a- I was born there, enough said, and b- it has just the right conditions and luck for life to exist. But I don't think it's so special that it's the only planet in the whole mind-boggingly large universe to be this way. There must be other planets/dice rolling out there. Until we find another such planet we cannot know for certain, but in my opinion it seems unlikely that these conditions don't exist anywhere else but on Earth. Why? Well, because the universe is so large -- the dice pool is very, very large.

travisjungroth 3y ago

I do think there’s other life out there. But just considering the other side, the statistical model only applies if the existence of life is actually stochastic. If a farmer plants a single tree in the middle of a square mile plot and rips up anything else that grows, any Fermi approximations done by the tree are going to be quite misleading.

xandrius 3y ago
Who's this galactic farmer you're talking about?
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  One or more beings with power and intelligence many orders of magnitude higher than our own. To call it god or gods gives a religious tone to it that totally derails the discussion and I’m specifically avoiding. This isn’t about going to church on Sundays. There are a few answers to the “Where are they?” question. One is that the parameters to the Drake equation mean life is so rare we actually are alone (as another commenter linked to). Another group of answers is that there is life, but something about the relationship between us means we don’t observe them. Maybe they’re hiding from us. Maybe they’re hiding from everyone. I think the range of possible answers that people think of for this scenario is generally much too narrow. The power imbalances can be wildly greater than “they’re avoiding us”. We experience power imbalances this large every day. What’s the relationship between a Petri dish of bacteria and a person? Imagine a culture of penicillin reasoning how it came to be. Maybe this universe is a total construction. Maybe it’s partially constructed, in the same way a farmer “makes” a farm from the Earth. If anything like that is the case, stochastic models are completely the wrong way to reason. It would be like if I wove a basket. There’s now at least one basket made by Travis Jungroth. Surely there must be more? Out of the millions of baskets made across time, what’s the probability that only one was made by me? Even for a low probability of any individual basket, the numbers start getting decent there’s another out there. But there’s not. I just… decided to make only one.
  - zolland 3y ago

mr_mitm 3y ago

First of all: the question needs to be qualified by what we mean by "out there". The galaxy? The observable universe? The entire universe? The universe might be infinite, in which case: yes, there is life out there. We know the probably of life forming on any given planet must be greater than zero, or else we wouldn't be here. From this we can deduce the average volume which contains exactly one planet with life, which must be finite. Whether it makes sense to talk about what could be happening beyond the cosmological event horizon is another discussion. If we are talking about the observable universe or an even smaller volume: How can you say it's statistically implausible without knowing the probability of life forming on any given planet? It might be incredibly small, yet greater than zero. Your line of reasoning is incredibly common but I can't help but feel like it's mainly driven by wishful thinking.

phantompeace 3y ago
Probably extrapolating from the fact that life here on Earth being found in harsh conditions, and those conditions being likely to be found all over the universe.

floxy 3y ago

"Dissolving the Fermi Paradox" https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404