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.
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
#12Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#13Is 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…
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#14My 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
#15Is 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…
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#16There 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
#17Earlier 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…
Re: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
#18The 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
#19Imagine 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
#20I'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…
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.