Pascal was bothered by it. In the Pensees he said “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” Maybe you’d enjoy this blog post about it: https://www.steelsnowflake.org/post/pascals-terror
Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
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Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#42I’m not really bothered at all. Something like us may exist many times over in the vast universe. We may never know. And that’s what is exciting, IMO. The idea of dying with all the answers is not that exciting to me. But to die with some of the answers, knowing there is the excitement of discovery, for future generations, is precious.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying you think Earth is the only planet to contain life?
Looking out there while there's an "invisible" world here they don't see. +. If it's on "tv" it's fake.
False dichotomy.
https://cliffberg.medium.com/the-false-dichotomy-of-space-ex...
https://www.universetoday.com/131376/shouldnt-fix-earth-firs...
https://www.marssociety.ca/the-fix-our-planet-first-fallacy/
Not sure what you mean by "tv" being fake.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#44The easier explanation is a higher power seeded life here. If you find a functioning phone on a beach, you don't just think a bunch of silicon molecules just evolved into a phone over millions of years. Someone is manipulating those molecules via complex processes. Most of the universe is entirely predictable. Planets and stars go in predictable orbits for billions of years. Climates are fairly predictable. But as so…
> The easier explanation is a higher power seeded life here. If you find a functioning phone on a beach, you don't just think a bunch of silicon molecules just evolved into a phone over millions of years. Someone is manipulating those molecules via complex processes.
You should read The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins as it directly refutes your claims. This is not a new debate in the field of theology.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#45I’m not really bothered at all. Something like us may exist many times over in the vast universe. We may never know. And that’s what is exciting, IMO. The idea of dying with all the answers is not that exciting to me. But to die with some of the answers, knowing there is the excitement of discovery, for future generations, is precious.
> The idea of dying with all the answers is not that exciting to me. But to die with some of the answers, knowing there is the excitement of discovery, for future generations, is precious.
The "why" of existence is part of the human condition, and it's a big reason for the development of individual and societal artistic and intellectual endeavors, including work that happened in pre-civilization by cave dwellers. I'd like to know what I can.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#46May 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 spa…
I don't understand either. Personally, I believe the rare earth hypothesis is more credible than it seems at first glance. But the matter is warped by our own definition of life, in that we're looking for familiar things (i.e. humanoids or bacteria or radio signals) out there. For me, when looking deeply at viruses, kinesin or even something like fire, the line between living and unliving seems like a pretty arbitrary definition in many ways. Which is fine, but if we decide the definition is something resembling us, or life on earth, then I think the rare earth hypothesis seems as credible as any other theory. Not to mention when you think deeply about physics, or just how inhospitable the vast majority of space seems to us. But on the other hand, I guess finding anything extraordinary or complex is all that we're really looking for.
But, regardless, I guess I am just confused, as bothersome to me sounds a bit like worry. I am not worried (i.e. bothered) about the matter, as it seems irrelevant to my livelihood. I believe I will die without knowing either way and have no qualms about that. But if you are bothered by the matter in the sense that you're just very interested, curious, and desiring to know, that's very understandable. It would be truly awesome if we found concrete evidence of life elsewhere.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#47A lot of people are bothered by it. There's not much we can do about it yet - we've done what we can with the crude methods we have available to look around, but we're severely knowledge-and-tech limited in ways of checking.
It leads to a lot of philosophical hypothesis though, including the idea of a "great filter", which makes a lot of people extremely worried. Hell, the richest man in the world, and one of the most powerful, is supposedly motivated by a desire to get off-world to avoid a future disaster. I haven't heard him speak specifically about lack-of-aliens as a reason for worry, but I'm sure he's come across that argument before.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#48This is more of a philosophical/spiritual question than a scientific/technological one.
Why?
I wouldn't be able to elaborate well so I asked ChatGPT and here's some pointers.
1. Familiarity Breeds Apathy – Most people grow up with the assumption that life exists only on Earth, so they don’t question it deeply. It’s just "the way things are."
2. Existential Avoidance – The idea that we might be utterly alone in the universe is terrifying. Conversely, the idea that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists but remains silent is equally unsettling. Many people avoid thinking about it altogether.
3. Spiritual and Religious Views – Some believe life’s uniqueness is evidence of divine intent, making it feel less like an anomaly and more like a purposeful design. Others believe that even if life exists elsewhere, our existence here is still sacred and meaningful.
4. Cognitive Limitation – The vastness of the universe and the complexity of abiogenesis (life’s origin) are difficult to grasp. People struggle to comprehend distances measured in light-years or probabilities that span billions of years.
5. Anthropic Principle – We exist to ask the question precisely because conditions allowed for life to emerge here. If life were common, we might not find it remarkable.
6. Lack of Direct Impact – Whether life exists elsewhere or not doesn’t change most people’s day-to-day experiences. They’re more concerned with immediate human concerns than cosmic loneliness.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking out there while there's an "invisible" world here they don't see. +. If it's on "tv" it's fake.
False dichotomy. https://cliffberg.medium.com/the-false-dichotomy-of-space-ex... https://www.universetoday.com/131376/shouldnt-fix-earth-firs... https://www.marssociety.ca/the-fix-our-planet-first-fallacy/ Not sure what you mean by "tv" being fake.
Mars Society founder Zubrin heads an aerospace R&D company....was formerly at Lockheed Martin Astronautics.
Cosmic Serpent. A young anthropologist takes ayhuasca and realises there's non-"academic" ways to ask questions and get answers. About reality.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?
#50I am of the view that the chance of life in a single universe is vanishingly small. Fortunately, there can be many, many universes, or many, many effective universes. I googled the number of stars in the universe and it said 10^23. I am admitteedly not sure exactly what all this entails, but that is a pretty small number. How many ways are there to arrange a deck of cards? 10^68. That means you would have to put 10^4…
Comparing a physical count to permutation count doesn’t really compute me to. The only correlation that these two concepts have is the fact that they are numbers. One scalar’s magnitude has no bearing on the significance of another’s in an entirely different domain.