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Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

astronomy.com

11–20 of 72 posts

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#11
post #7

I'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.

All problems [in philosophy] can be solved by another level of indirection...

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#12
Imagine how easily we can also become extict and even our most powerful technology isn't powerful enough to save us. Imagine a big explosion in our galaxy , like that supernova that happend recently. We could die out like ants. We should be progressing faster...

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#13

Is 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 [2] http://mason.gmu.ed…

Same impression here, nothing new in this article. Its part of numerous ideas discussed before. And there is no hard evidence to support if this is the main bottle neck or not.

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#14
post #3

My 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…

Its not just difficult to grasp. Its very difficult to estimate in the first place since have very little data at hand to make any call. For example we may take 1/9 for the probability of life appearing in a given planetary system, but we have no idea if this is representative or not of usual probabilities or if our system is exceptional in any way.

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#15

Is 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 [2] http://mason.gmu.ed…

What I got was that the rapid emergence of biological feedback was essential for regularizing climate which in turn enabled life on earth to evolve. In a way, life itself enabled life on earth. It's the rarity of this emergence that is important rather than the rarity of intelligent life. Another thing I got is that life itself will destroy life the way climate change is going :-)

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#16
post #2

There 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.

There's also the Fermi paradox which makes those speculative declarations somewhat believable..

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#17
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Good point, missed those statements (forest for the trees I guess). Those are quite unfortunate!

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#18
No answer to the Fermi Paradox works if it requires all aliens to uniformly come to the same end state or satisfy some boundary condition without exception. All it takes is the one exception, one small group in one suitably advanced civilization, and you have self-replicating probes building an expanding wave of computronium, dismantling even the stars themselves as soon as the economics favor a better use for that matter. Such as more computronium.

The Fermi Paradox is more the Wilderness Paradox: why is everything, everywhere we look, wild and unmodified? Why are there still stars, when a simple economic analysis of our future tells us that we will tear them down in favor of more efficient arrangements of matter and energy?

https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-noocene/

"Per our present understanding of physics and intelligent economic activity, we will turn every part of the great span of the universe into our descendants if not diverted or stopped by some outside influence, stars and all. The cosmological noocene, an ocean of intelligence. That the natural universe remains present to be used by us indicates that something is awry, however, that some vital and important understanding is missing, and as a species we are still just making the first fumbling explorations of the bounds of the possible with regards to what it is that we don't know."

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#19

Imagine how easily we can also become extict and even our most powerful technology isn't powerful enough to save us. Imagine a big explosion in our galaxy , like that supernova that happend recently. We could die out like ants. We should be progressing faster...

We're already progressing at breakneck speed. The last 10,000 years saw us go from stone tools to the Samsung S6.

Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly

#20
post #7

I'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…

One thing to keep in mind is that the time interval of stability for Earth as a life-bearing planet is actually fairly close to the end. We're past the 75% point. The Sun's evolution will "soon" put an end to that (speaking on a cosmic scale).

So it seems like it was a close call. Life needed almost the full extent of that interval of stability to create an (arguably) intelligent species. There can be no reset and start over. This is it, for the solar system. If we fail to survive, this whole star and its planets have failed to produce viable intelligence.

If Earth turns out to somehow be unusually stable as a life-bearing planet, this might explain a large portion of the Fermi paradox. This might be a large chunk of the Great Filter.

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