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Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

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Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#51

Post by chiefalchemist »

baddox wrote: post #35
yters wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anthropic principle doesn't make our universe any less surprising. It's like saying "of course I survived that catastrophic accident, otherwise I wouldn't be observing the fact I survived the accident."

The difference is that we have a decent amount of information on the number of catastrophic accidents that occur and the number of people who survive them. Since that number is known to be low, there’s nothing unsurprising about your own survival of such an accident. But we don’t know the number of times life has emerged in the universe, except that it is at least 1. Every intelligent life form we are aware of are on…

I was feeling the same thing. We have absolutely no context.

That said, I think it's fair to review the history if events, in a butterfly effect sort of way, as interdependent and each built upon the other. Could some other sequence have the same / similar ends? Of course. But let's not be so quick to say, "there are other planets similar to our own, we can not be alone." It's not only the planet but also the history.

Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#52

Post by randallsquared »

baddox wrote: post #35
yters wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anthropic principle doesn't make our universe any less surprising. It's like saying "of course I survived that catastrophic accident, otherwise I wouldn't be observing the fact I survived the accident."

The difference is that we have a decent amount of information on the number of catastrophic accidents that occur and the number of people who survive them. Since that number is known to be low, there’s nothing unsurprising about your own survival of such an accident. But we don’t know the number of times life has emerged in the universe, except that it is at least 1. Every intelligent life form we are aware of are on…

I haven’t read the article, yet, so I’m not sure it didn’t mention this, but the fact that the universe we see appears natural and unworked is a powerful argument for the number of “survivors” being ultra-low.

Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#53

Post by state_less »

kldavis4 wrote: post #8
rocqua wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't that break down due to a total measurement bias? That is, if the universe were not tuned for life, there would be no-one around to wonder why that is the case.

Isn't that just the anthropic principle? That's another explanation for a life friendly universe, but not something that can be proved or taken as proof.

But you wouldn't post such things on another day, on another thread, on a topic unrelated. Hacker news and the commenters here are not gods finely tuning comments.

Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#54

Post by YaxelPerez »

zamalek wrote: post #37
baddox wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that we have a decent amount of information on the number of catastrophic accidents that occur and the number of people who survive them. Since that number is known to be low, there’s nothing unsurprising about your own survival of such an accident. But we don’t know the number of times life has emerged in the universe, except that it is at least 1. Every intelligent life form we are aware of are on…

There's this analogy. It's a bridge representing species progress. If you fall off of it, you are extinct. All life that we know of has fallen off and it is certain that we will too. AI is impressive in this scenario because it exists outside of nature, it might fall "upwards" (towards immortality). This is why I am a proponent of SAI; I would let SAI out of the box. In the larger scheme of things, humans will go ext…

I'm guessing SAI is Super Artificial Intelligence, right?

It's a mistake to anthropomorphize AI. Pity is a mammal thing.

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...

Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#55

Post by marcosdumay »

eulo__ wrote: post #47
natecavanaugh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one is my favorite comments of all time, simply because while I was familiar with the Fermi Paradox, the rest of the links were new and unexpected. Thank you!

Learning about the great filter can cause depression, reader beware.

Compared with the apparent impossibility of life being created from nothing, I just can not understand why people insist so much that the Great Filter is in the future, instead of the past.

Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#56

Post by erric »

randallsquared wrote: post #52
baddox wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that we have a decent amount of information on the number of catastrophic accidents that occur and the number of people who survive them. Since that number is known to be low, there’s nothing unsurprising about your own survival of such an accident. But we don’t know the number of times life has emerged in the universe, except that it is at least 1. Every intelligent life form we are aware of are on…

I haven’t read the article, yet, so I’m not sure it didn’t mention this, but the fact that the universe we see appears natural and unworked is a powerful argument for the number of “survivors” being ultra-low.

Or maybe we’re just first? Depressing either way.

Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#57

Post by frozennorth »

danieltillett wrote: post #40
mikeytown2 wrote: post #34

Makes me think about the Fermi paradox [1] and Great Filters [2]. But for all we know the universe could be full of life at chimpanzee intelligence; no way to know unless we send probes [3] or seriously up our telescopes [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(sp…

The Fermi paradox is unlikely to be answered by something making it very unlikely for our chimp level ancestors jumping to human level. The number of Homo species on the planet that co-evolved to human level intelligence suggests this is not extremely difficult. What is a huge filter is the requirement of a stable climate over million of years. The key to this is the Moon which keeps the Earth's axis of rotation from…

Do you mind explaining why the current moon hypothesis isn't likely?

The consensus from the intro geology classes I've take seems to be that the Earth was hit by a Mars sized object which caused the resulting molten debris to coalesce and differentiate forming our current Moon in the process.

Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#58

Post by ideonexus »

This principle is also why creationists don't understand how the world around us seems so engineered for us. That's because it was engineered... by our ancestors. The peach is a great example of this. Peaches didn't exist 3,000 years ago, but were engineered from a bitter, mostly-pit fruit through artificial selection into what we enjoy today. The same is true of corn, tomatoes, lettuce, cows, chickens, and so many other agricultural products. These things never existed in nature, we engineered them, but we just see the end result.

A fascinating aspect of this I learned about recently was the importance of fire to human development. I always imagined this tool in the context of humans huddled around a campfire for warmth and cooking, but our ancestors actually applied it on a much more epic scale. They burned down entire forests to create open fields where predators couldn't hide and where they could forage for well-cooked critters amid the ashes. Everywhere we migrated, we geoengineered forests into savannas.

Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#59

Post by stevenwoo »

8bitsrule wrote: post #14

Kind of ironic to think that humans survived a million-year ice age, then might be destroyed by some fool with a button. If 'our universe' is 'tuned for life', it certainly isn't specifically tuned for human life (e.g. plague, volcanos). Nature offers us no guarantees. Unless we stay in tune with that accord, we will be removed.

Aren't homo sapiens here only because an asteroid strike around 70 million years ago caused a culling that killed the dinosaurs and sort of reset life to favor small mammals over the dinosaurs? If perhaps that had not hit the earth, we would not be here and something that evolved from dinosaurs would be the top of the food chain and typing comments here! We had to get that one strike in at the right time (from our perspective) and then not another semi-apocalyptic event to get to here.

Re: Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous

#60

Post by danieltillett »

frozennorth wrote: post #57
danieltillett wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fermi paradox is unlikely to be answered by something making it very unlikely for our chimp level ancestors jumping to human level. The number of Homo species on the planet that co-evolved to human level intelligence suggests this is not extremely difficult. What is a huge filter is the requirement of a stable climate over million of years. The key to this is the Moon which keeps the Earth's axis of rotation from…

Do you mind explaining why the current moon hypothesis isn't likely? The consensus from the intro geology classes I've take seems to be that the Earth was hit by a Mars sized object which caused the resulting molten debris to coalesce and differentiate forming our current Moon in the process.

It is not that the hypothesis is unlikely [0], it is the formation of the moon that is very unlikely. When you try to simulate a collision between the Earth and Mars-sized planet it is very unlikely to create the Moon.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Moon

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