New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
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Re: New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
#2Whatever happens, its kind of troubling.
If JWST finds life, that changes the Drake equation. It means civilization/intelligent life is either extremely improbable, or (more probably) extremely unstable and fleeting. Our odds would not be good.
If it finds nothing, that just extends the uncertainty for a long time.
Re: New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
#3I found https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/2023/webb-discovers-methane-car...
which says that K2-18b is 120 light years away, in the Leo constellation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_(constellation)
Re: New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
#4Whatever happens, its kind of troubling. If JWST finds life, that changes the Drake equation. It means civilization/intelligent life is either extremely improbable, or (more probably) extremely unstable and fleeting. Our odds would not be good. If it finds nothing, that just extends the uncertainty for a long time.
Our odds for what? Eternal survival as a species?
Re: New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
#5Whatever happens, its kind of troubling. If JWST finds life, that changes the Drake equation. It means civilization/intelligent life is either extremely improbable, or (more probably) extremely unstable and fleeting. Our odds would not be good. If it finds nothing, that just extends the uncertainty for a long time.
Our odds for what? Eternal survival as a species?
Or even just surviving for a few more centuries.
Re: New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
#6Whatever happens, its kind of troubling. If JWST finds life, that changes the Drake equation. It means civilization/intelligent life is either extremely improbable, or (more probably) extremely unstable and fleeting. Our odds would not be good. If it finds nothing, that just extends the uncertainty for a long time.
Doesn't it depend on where it finds life? It would in fact be bad news to find life on Mars (as Nick Bostrom is fond of explaining), but would finding life 120 light years away drastically alter the Drake equation?
Re: New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
#7Whatever happens, its kind of troubling. If JWST finds life, that changes the Drake equation. It means civilization/intelligent life is either extremely improbable, or (more probably) extremely unstable and fleeting. Our odds would not be good. If it finds nothing, that just extends the uncertainty for a long time.
Doesn't it depend on where it finds life? It would in fact be bad news to find life on Mars (as Nick Bostrom is fond of explaining), but would finding life 120 light years away drastically alter the Drake equation?
If life is a mere 120 lightyears away, that still means its everywhere in the milky way and other galaxies. That should be plenty of "seed" for intelligent life to develop even with very low probability on each planet.
Re: New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't it depend on where it finds life? It would in fact be bad news to find life on Mars (as Nick Bostrom is fond of explaining), but would finding life 120 light years away drastically alter the Drake equation?
If life is a mere 120 lightyears away, that still means its everywhere in the milky way and other galaxies. That should be plenty of "seed" for intelligent life to develop even with very low probability on each planet.
There was another thread today with the headline "If Earth Is Average, We Should Find Extraterrestrial Life Within 60 Light-Years" [0], and the grabby aliens model apparently estimates 1 billion light-years. So it seems the volume of a sphere of radius 120 million light years is at least within an order of magnitude of the space within which some models predict the emergence of life.
Re: New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
#9Whatever happens, its kind of troubling. If JWST finds life, that changes the Drake equation. It means civilization/intelligent life is either extremely improbable, or (more probably) extremely unstable and fleeting. Our odds would not be good. If it finds nothing, that just extends the uncertainty for a long time.
Just think of how many planets in the universe had life but it was extinguished because the star died. Or the entire system flew into a black hole. Or an asteroid wiped it out.
It took a third of the age of the universe for intelligent life to evolve on Earth. Just think how rare it must have been to have a life-supporting planet and not gotten destroyed by a celestial event for that long.
Re: New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
If life is a mere 120 lightyears away, that still means its everywhere in the milky way and other galaxies. That should be plenty of "seed" for intelligent life to develop even with very low probability on each planet.
There was another thread today with the headline "If Earth Is Average, We Should Find Extraterrestrial Life Within 60 Light-Years" [0], and the grabby aliens model apparently estimates 1 billion light-years. So it seems the volume of a sphere of radius 120 million light years is at least within an order of magnitude of the space within which some models predict the emergence of life. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/…
The big point is that any intelligent extraterrestrial life should be highly visible, and spread itself out at some fraction of the speed of light.
Earth as it is right now is in a fleeting transition period on cosmic timescales. It seems unreasonable to assume other extraterrestrial life that evolves to be intelligent/space faring would stay in that state for millions of years.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, and lets assume it was only "inhabitable" more recently. So if there is any intelligent life within ~500m lightyears, we should probably know about it, because they would have spread out to Earth by now.
If primitive life is "common: in every galaxy (aka detectable by the JWST right now), then the ascendance to intelligence would have to be extraordinarily uncommon for spacefaring life not to spawn. I find this unlikely based on Earth's history, which would mean intelligent civilization is extremely likely to "burn out" before it spreads over the stars enough to be visible, or there is some other likely-not-good reason why we can't detect abundant spacefaring life yet.