4 ms·
Why does everyone assume that if life has existed on another planet for a billion or two years, it must necessarily be similar to life on our planet and be inte
by memracom 13y ago
Why does everyone assume that if life has existed on another planet for a billion or two years, it must necessarily be similar to life on our planet and be intelligent with some sort of civilization? Why could it not be a planet filled with brainless jellyfish and green algae?
People forget that our planet has been through several catastrophic events that happened at certain times in our planetary evolution, and on other planets those events did not happen, or happened at different points in their evolution, or those events had a more severe impact. Things like the snowball earth phase, and the comet that triggered the die off of most dinosaurs. Maybe most planets are inhabited by symbiotic colonies of advanced trilobites 20 meters long crawling the ocean floor eating the abundant sponges. Have a look at the wierd and wonderful pre-cambrian life forms that somehow combined to create the kind of animalia that we know today. What triggered that? And earlier, what triggered the abundant bacterial mats to start forming mobile colonies?
Sure, life is everywhere in the universe but the trajectory that life took on earth will be exceedingly rare and we may never encounter another such planet even if we develop advanced star travel.
- obblekk 13y agoPart of the Drake equation is multiplying by the probability that intelligent life evolves. Of course we only have one data point, but it seems like intelligence is a pretty good response to many evolutionary pressures and so is likely to come about over time. Of course, this depends on how frequent you think intelligence is. I think most people assume it's very frequent.
- millstone 13y agoWe should take your idea and push it farther: We're not looking for life. If we found an advanced civilization of intelligent robots, would we shrug and say "too bad they're not alive?" Of course not. So it's not life we hope to find.
- EliRivers 13y agoWhy does everyone assume that... They don't. They really don't. Do you honestly think you're the first person to ever think of this?
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoThe question is pretty specifically about intelligent aliens. SETI, all of that stuff.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago> Why could it not be a planet filled with brainless jellyfish and green algae? It could be even worse. Maybe we're not finding "life" because the only thing we have to compare to is life on Earth. Maybe there is life at different physical / time scales that we completely miss. Maybe what we call life, and specially intelligent life, is nothing special at all. I find amusing that the general expectation is to find slightly different humans, with civilizations and communication and interstellar ships.