There are more solar systems in the universe than there are GRAINS OF SAND on our planet. We have explored such a ridiculously small amount of the universe that your assertion doesn't make much sense.
Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#22Even if we knew there's life on some other planet... what would we do with that information? If you wanted to send a message there, you wouldn't live long enough to get the response anymore. So at this point the discovery would be meaningful for the civiliasation (maybe), but meaningless for us personally.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#23My personal belief is that there are aliens out there but they aren't as advanced as us so no electricity to send signals or maybe they are too far away to send a signal yet?
It takes a lot more than electricity to send a detectable signal multiple light years. And unless we're lucky, the minimum is likely to be tens of light years.
Assuming we even found a likely star system, built some huge focused transmitter, we'd still need to broadcast for probably hundreds of years for it to have a chance of being received. And that's hoping the other side are in exactly the right stage of their development, have built a big receiver and happen to be pointing at us.
Which is to say that the risk of finding life via radio, is, well, pretty small.
We're more likely to find life by visiting other planets. To do that you only need to solve 5 (mildly hard) problems. A) you need a multi-generational ship B) a power source that can last at least 1000 years C) a self-sustaining human population - probably between 200 to 600 individuals. Likely spread over 3 generations in terms of age. D) an in-board biome capable of supplying food an oxygen to sustain the population. E) pick a good direction to go in.
Given that pretty much any, and every, thing that can go wrong will kill the crew pretty quick, chances are the ship won't last a decade.
Of course even if the descendants of the crew actually find something, they won't have any way to tell us.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#24Where does the rush come from? From within yourself and wanting discoveries to be made in your lifetime?
The way humanity approaches and organizes things, where everything and everyone is owned and just a tool to increase profit to repeat the same process, spells doom for what we touch. We may feel the need to discover other life to maybe fix us, but other life doesn't need to be discovered by us. Not with the state we're in.
And when it comes to intelligent, advanced life, we might just be drunk assholes running through a forest, screaming, then concluding squirrels don't exist. I mean, that's how I'd react to humanity if I didn't need them. I'd observe them and make 100% sure they never see me. If I couldn't observe them without seeing me, I wouldn't observe them. I might even try to forget them ^^
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#25This is more of a philosophical/spiritual question than a scientific/technological one.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#26May I ask why you find it so troubling? I mean, what if we were the only life in the universe? Would that be bothersome? What if we weren't? Is that more bothersome? Or is merely the fact of not knowing bothersome?
Per my understanding of how Mars used to be [1], I don't understand how there aren't even any records of microfossils. I also don't understand why the rest of the universe looks pristine. For example, intelligent life on Earth has created so much space junk in just ~300000 years since the earliest human civilization. It appears that intelligent life, once it forms, doesn't take much to go from pre-civilization to space exploration, at least based on human civilizations.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/mars-may-have-been-mo...
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#27Where does the rush come from? From within yourself and wanting discoveries to be made in your lifetime? The way humanity approaches and organizes things, where everything and everyone is owned and just a tool to increase profit to repeat the same process, spells doom for what we touch. We may feel the need to discover other life to maybe fix us, but other life doesn't need to be discovered by us. Not with the state…
> Where does the rush come from? From within yourself and wanting discoveries to be made in your lifetime?
Yeah, I know that answering some of these questions in my lifetime is improbable, but I'd like to help the effort.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#28This cannot be stressed enough:
Space is big. Whatever you think big is, it’s so much bigger, that even thinking about it is mind bending and could induce vertigo.
The nearest star, our Sun, could hold 1.3 million Earths. It only looks the size it does because it’s far away. How far? At the speed of causality (the universal speed limit), which is the speed at which light travels in a vacuum, of 3.0 x 10^8 m/s or 670.6 million miles per hour (pretty fast), light from the Sun takes 7 minutes to reach Earth. For a comparison on the scale of just the planets in our solar system, that same light takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto.
You might think that’s not so big.
As a point of reference, Voyager, which has been traveling since 1977 (~47 years) at around 38,000 mph, is around 23.5 light hours away.
Now, our closest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years from Earth. Voyager hasn’t even gone a light day in nearly 50 years. At currently attainable speeds, it would take over 50,000 years to get there.
That’s just the closest star. Just one potential solar system.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is thought to have 1-400 BILLION stars (hard to tell from the inside). Our observations indicate that it is 100,000 light years across.
Now if that wasn’t bad enough, for intergalactic travel, the closest galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away. It is estimated to have up to a trillion stars.
After that, it gets even more stupefying. We can see hundreds of billions (with a b) of galaxies as far away as GN-z11, which is estimated to be 32 BILLION light years away.
We’ve made it less than a light day.
We have no idea if we can even approach even a substantial fraction of the speed of light, and even if we could, there’s time dilation and the issue of slowing dowm. Communication would be anywhere from difficult to inconvenient to practically impossible.
Anything beyond that is either science fiction or a very well kept secret.
So that’s the reason we don’t have alien fossils or microbes.
It can take 18 months just to get to the next closest planet, and 8-10 yesrs to get to the farthest. never mind anywhere else.
And we are so far away from everything (as is everything else), even if there were radio or tv broadcasts, they would be far too weak for us to detect.
There probably is life out there, but maybe the great filter is that stars have a fixed lifespan and the distances are just too great to overcome.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#29This is more of a philosophical/spiritual question than a scientific/technological one.
Why?
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#30I'm a proponent of the "firstborn" hypothesis — we don't see any other signs of life yet because the universe is still in its relative infancy and we're among the first sentient species to pop up out of the primordial muck.
It's anthrocentric, but humans are the smartest people I know so I cut them some slack ;)