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65 million light years away, unless there is a system of giant mirrors out there. It is a nice thought though. That was a real rough day for Earth, but we turn

65 million light years away, unless there is a system of giant mirrors out there. It is a nice thought though. That was a real rough day for Earth, but we turned out alright in the end.

steve_adams_86 2y ago
It just occurred to me that if dinosaurs never existed here and we found them somewhere else, they’d be such an incredible discovery. We’re lucky to have such an awesome history of life on this planet.
- lukan 2y ago
  "We’re lucky to have such an awesome history of life on this planet." We are probably lucky, to have life at all.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    Humans are probably unique. Intelligent life probably not and life at all is likely commonplace. It would be quite a miracle if given the size and scale of the universe Earth is the only place where life arose and also managed to evolve multiple intelligent species also emerged (cephalopods, dolphins, elephants, and primates at least)
    - wruza 2y ago
      It depends. If simple life is common, how rare is GOE or a similar event? If GOE is not that rare, it feels like intelligent life is just a matter of time, ice ages and enough branches to grab on. Otoh if we are the result of a long domino chain, the universe life is screwed.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        I have no idea what GOE is, but everything we learn about astronomy indicates that neither Earth nor our solar system is particularly unique, so “long sequence of dominoes” would be a very unlikely situation in something as large as the know universe, even ignoring the parts we could never observe.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      There is a theory that humanoids aren't actually unique, if there's large animals on other planets in the universe. Our body plan has several survival advantages so it's quite possible evolution could have had similar results elsewhere. Bipedalism is really great for efficiency of locomotion (humans can walk really really far), and having two limbs with opposable thumbs is really useful for grasping and manipulating, which makes it much more likely that species will invent tools and technology. Note I'm not claiming humanoids are all over the place, but with 400B stars in our galaxy, 1T stars in Andromeda next door, and other galaxies with similarly huge numbers of stars, multiplied by all the number of galaxies in the observable universe, multiplied by the number of exoplanets in the "Goldilocks zone", it's quite possible intelligent, humanoid life has evolved somewhere out there.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        That would be a stronger claim than the one I made which is just that life exists in some form somewhere else in the universe with a relatively high abundance and it’s highly likely intelligent life exists somewhere as well. It becomes harder to reason that humanoid life and even intelligent humanoid life must exist somewhere else without any actual data points.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        >That would be a stronger claim than the one I made which is just that life exists in some form somewhere else in the universe with a relatively high abundance and it’s highly likely intelligent life exists somewhere as well. Sure, but we're probably thinking of "intelligent life that can build a civilization", right? In that case, highly-intelligent alien orcas aren't going to meet the requirement. They just don't have a body type that allows them to change their environment and build technology. If there really are alien civilizations out there, like in Star Trek, that show might not actually be that far off with its assumption that 95% of them are humanoid. And in this case, there could very well be lots of other intelligent life, but which never managed to build a civilization.
        2y ago
- withinboredom 2y ago
  Reminds me of "Carl's Doomsday Scenario" where they pick up a pet that happens to be an "a species seeded on all life-supporting planets, but a nasty asteroid caused them to go extinct here. I believe they are called 'Velociraptors' here."
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  Dinosaurs were only first discovered in 1824: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/01/europe/megalosaurus-first-dinosaur-discovery-scn/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/01/europe/megalosaurus-first-din... It must have been an incredible discovery at the time.
  - mr_toad 2y ago
    Dinosaur fossils had been discovered before, but they were misidentified as elephants, whales or even giants and dragons.

65 million light years away, unless there is a system of giant mirrors out there. It is a nice thought though. That was a real rough day for Earth, but we turned out alright in the end.

steve_adams_86 2y ago

It just occurred to me that if dinosaurs never existed here and we found them somewhere else, they’d be such an incredible discovery. We’re lucky to have such an awesome history of life on this planet.

lukan 2y ago
"We’re lucky to have such an awesome history of life on this planet." We are probably lucky, to have life at all.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Humans are probably unique. Intelligent life probably not and life at all is likely commonplace. It would be quite a miracle if given the size and scale of the universe Earth is the only place where life arose and also managed to evolve multiple intelligent species also emerged (cephalopods, dolphins, elephants, and primates at least)
  - wruza 2y ago
    It depends. If simple life is common, how rare is GOE or a similar event? If GOE is not that rare, it feels like intelligent life is just a matter of time, ice ages and enough branches to grab on. Otoh if we are the result of a long domino chain, the universe life is screwed.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      I have no idea what GOE is, but everything we learn about astronomy indicates that neither Earth nor our solar system is particularly unique, so “long sequence of dominoes” would be a very unlikely situation in something as large as the know universe, even ignoring the parts we could never observe.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    There is a theory that humanoids aren't actually unique, if there's large animals on other planets in the universe. Our body plan has several survival advantages so it's quite possible evolution could have had similar results elsewhere. Bipedalism is really great for efficiency of locomotion (humans can walk really really far), and having two limbs with opposable thumbs is really useful for grasping and manipulating, which makes it much more likely that species will invent tools and technology. Note I'm not claiming humanoids are all over the place, but with 400B stars in our galaxy, 1T stars in Andromeda next door, and other galaxies with similarly huge numbers of stars, multiplied by all the number of galaxies in the observable universe, multiplied by the number of exoplanets in the "Goldilocks zone", it's quite possible intelligent, humanoid life has evolved somewhere out there.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      That would be a stronger claim than the one I made which is just that life exists in some form somewhere else in the universe with a relatively high abundance and it’s highly likely intelligent life exists somewhere as well. It becomes harder to reason that humanoid life and even intelligent humanoid life must exist somewhere else without any actual data points.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        >That would be a stronger claim than the one I made which is just that life exists in some form somewhere else in the universe with a relatively high abundance and it’s highly likely intelligent life exists somewhere as well. Sure, but we're probably thinking of "intelligent life that can build a civilization", right? In that case, highly-intelligent alien orcas aren't going to meet the requirement. They just don't have a body type that allows them to change their environment and build technology. If there really are alien civilizations out there, like in Star Trek, that show might not actually be that far off with its assumption that 95% of them are humanoid. And in this case, there could very well be lots of other intelligent life, but which never managed to build a civilization.
        2y ago
withinboredom 2y ago
Reminds me of "Carl's Doomsday Scenario" where they pick up a pet that happens to be an "a species seeded on all life-supporting planets, but a nasty asteroid caused them to go extinct here. I believe they are called 'Velociraptors' here."
BurningFrog 2y ago
Dinosaurs were only first discovered in 1824: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/01/europe/megalosaurus-first-dinosaur-discovery-scn/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/01/europe/megalosaurus-first-din... It must have been an incredible discovery at the time.
- mr_toad 2y ago
  Dinosaur fossils had been discovered before, but they were misidentified as elephants, whales or even giants and dragons.