Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
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Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#2There sure are a lot of confident yet highly speculative declarations about life in that article, in spite of the fact that we currently only have a sample size of one.
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#3My personal lesson from the fermi paradox and the drake equation in particular is that we humans are terrible at grasping very small probabilities. Intuition completely fails when we have to decide if something has the probability 10^-5 or 10^-50, which makes sense because for almost all practical purposes both are almost zero in most situations, but for edge cases like the drake equation they make all the difference.
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#4There sure are a lot of confident yet highly speculative declarations about life in that article, in spite of the fact that we currently only have a sample size of one.
Really? Which declaration in particular are you referring to?
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#5Is there anything revelatory in this article? I didn't see any links or references to new papers/ideas, but some Googling returned this 2016 PDF[1] titled 'The Case for a Gaian Bottleneck' by Aditya Chopra from ANU.
There's been discussion in the past[2][3] about these 'Great Filters' that prevent life from occurring everywhere in the universe.
[1]http://adi.life/pubs/ChopraLineweaver2016.pdf
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#6There sure are a lot of confident yet highly speculative declarations about life in that article, in spite of the fact that we currently only have a sample size of one.
Really? Which declaration in particular are you referring to?
> Early life is fragile
> The aliens are silent because they are extinct
> new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets
I'm not disputing the science or studies the article refers to (I'm far from qualified for that), I believe that models of plausibility are an important part of the process, but as with most science journalism they just can't help turning them into some sort of "absolute" statements.
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#7I've been reading The Vital Question by Nick Lane, where he puts forth some theories about the origin of eukaryotes, and life in general. It does make it seem that abiogenesis and eukaryote-genesis are much more difficult than we give them credit for.
So in the Drake Equation, I think that F[L] is probably pretty low.
And because eukaroyte genesis is difficult and only happened once (and it took a billion years of bacteria & archea hanging out before we got a eukaryote), and eukaryotes are a prereq for multi-cellular organisms and thus intelligent life, F[i] is also really low.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins/d...
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#8I've been reading The Vital Question by Nick Lane, where he puts forth some theories about the origin of eukaryotes, and life in general. It does make it seem that abiogenesis and eukaryote-genesis are much more difficult than we give them credit for. So in the Drake Equation, I think that F[L] is probably pretty low. And because eukaroyte genesis is difficult and only happened once (and it took a billion years of ba…
Panspermia is one solution to this.
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#9I've been reading The Vital Question by Nick Lane, where he puts forth some theories about the origin of eukaryotes, and life in general. It does make it seem that abiogenesis and eukaryote-genesis are much more difficult than we give them credit for. So in the Drake Equation, I think that F[L] is probably pretty low. And because eukaroyte genesis is difficult and only happened once (and it took a billion years of ba…
This gets my vote. My hunch is that intelligent life like the kind we would love to meet happens either on the order of once or twice per galaxy during the galaxy's entire lifetime, or it happens SO rarely that, if the universe is infinite in extent, then any intelligent observer looking out from the "center" of their observable universe will most likely be in the only intelligent civilization in that visible radius.
Depressing, but it seems more plausible than things like "Great Filters of DOOM". It would predict that there is a lot of intelligence in the entire universe, but each cluster of intelligence is profoundly alone.
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#10People always talk about how vast space is, but rarely about how vast time is. We've been looking for life for the last what, 60 years or so? It seems like not only is space so vast which makes finding evidence of life hard, but this is made even harder by the small volume of time we are likely to be around to try and observe in the grand scheme of things. Alien life has to be relatively close in terms of distance as well as time.
What if our closest alien life became discoverable (started emitting radio signals or other signs) a million years from now? Would we be around to see it?