Surely atmospheric change is at least theoretically detectable from another solar system. And thousands if not millions of species are capable of that.
Impossible? Really?
Take mitochondria. One line of argument is that the endosymbiotic event that created them happened (successfully) once, after 1.5 billion years of evolution, and never again in the next 2.5 billion. Without that one event we don’t have eukaryotes; which encompass all of what we’d call complex life.
Suppose that endosymbiosis simply doesn’t happen very often? Suppose that very few earthlike planets get the 3.5 billion years of uninterrupted liveable conditions that Earth needed to evolve from the simplest life to the Cambrian explosion? (e.g. Mars)
I was recently at an astronomy talk about current progress in the search for life elsewhere in the galaxy, and it sure sounded like they expect to have a much better idea of how common favorable signs of (mostly simple) life are as soon as the next generation of space telescopes are deployed. The James Webb telescope in particular was expected to be quite fruitful on this front, especially as concerns the “density” of life in the cosmos.
So hopefully we’ll know with a much greater degree of certainty in just a few years! In the meantime, I find that the You Are Not Special principle almost always applies, even in cases where something is exceedingly rare. It’s a big universe, and it’s been around a very long time.
This is 100% correct. We can already get a good sense of atmospheric composition for some exoplanets, which is one viable way to look for indications of life. With the next generation of instrumentation, I expect we’ll have more data of that sort than we can easily process. That’s pretty much the direction of astronomy in general these days, honestly - all these detailed surveys producing more data than anyone has time to look through.
That’s a variation of the Cosmological Principle, the idea that the entire universe operates on the same physical laws and that our place and situation in it are not privileged.
In general that’s well established, but on this particular topic Enrico Fermi already asked the critical question: If intelligent life is common, where is everybody? Why should we have been first in our little corner of the universe if we’re not special? Why wasn’t there some pan-galactic empire extant by the time we rose to sentience?
People often misunderstand this as “why haven’t we found signs of it” and answer “we’re not looking hard enough/correctly/etc” but Fermi seriously meant why aren’t they already here. The galaxy’s been around for much longer than this particular solar system, where would we be 1 billion years from now? Of course, if your answer is “we’ll have long since killed ourselves” that may well be exactly the problem, but I’d hope intelligent life isn’t intrinsically suicidal.
I think that this principle helps to explain why we are unlikely to find intelligent extraterrestrial life. It’s precisely because from an evolutionary perspective, intelligence is not that special. There is an unspoken assumption that complex life “should” eventually evolve intelligence, but I don’t think the facts bear that out. It happened to be useful to our species, but ultimately it’s no more special than other freaky adaptations on earth that we don’t expect to find on other planets.
I may have exaggerated a bit sadly. We are not special
If our efforts are like the James Webb Space Telescope not ever getting off the ground, then it might be much longer than 30 years. Also not sure if whatever totalitarian regime controls the US in 30 years will have any interest in space exploration.
Totalitarian states tend to value space exploration above things like feeding and housing their people, since they see it as a tool for self-aggrandizement. See the Soviet space program, for example.
Tak I still feel our democracy is strong – and that capitalism will get us into space.
Vin you aren’t saying that the physical laws vary from place to place in the universe are you? Is that a … theory?
Listen as a lawyer I have enough trouble with Time being subjective. But when you say that the Andromeda galaxy (for example) may have different physical laws…
Absolutely not, I’m saying exactly the opposite - physics is physics everywhere.
What a nightmare it would be if it wasn’t.
Ah good. I can now sleep better. I was worried I missed something.
It would essentially be impossible to make rational inquiries about the universe. There’s a thoughtful sci fi plot in this somewhere…
The cosmological principle is a prerequisite for scientific inquiry, and it seems easy to accept. But from a rigorous logical perspective, there is exactly zero evidence that supports it. Because in order to show that it’s true, you first have to implicitly assume that it’s true.
I don’t think that analogy is really uh, analogous to intelligence in general. And if we want to work the numbers, then sure only one out of however many millions of species developed this level of intelligence. But 1 out of 10 million species are pretty damn great odds for the scales we’re dealing with when we start talking about planetary ecosystems and beyond.
Perhaps, but not for the reasons you first surmised, yes? Besides, in our case, it still left one on this planet, which you have said would be “exceedingly rare”. If intelligent races advance to become interstellar travelers that then proceed to go around wiping out other intelligent races, then perhaps it would increase rarity (unless they go on to inhabit said planet).
Endosymbiosis as a process has happened far more than just once in the history of life on this planet though, and I don’t really see any evidence for why it wouldn’t occur on other planets as well. It may very well be the most important determining factor for complex life, though.
I guess my main point here is that, I think we’re going to find that Earth is not that special in terms of it providing a suitable environment for life. And when life first arose on this planet, that environment was actually far, far different than what it is today. The more we look, the more we find life thriving in places we would think to be inhospitable. I just don’t see any compelling reasons for why life wouldn’t arise and evolve just as it did here.
I do agree that intelligence is not the endgame for the evolution of every branch of life, but it is far more special than other adaptations for a couple reasons. Firstly, it grants you the ability to survive practically any environment, and in fact gives you the ability to alter said environment to suit your needs. But I guess most importantly, it is perhaps the only adaptation that has the potential to grant you survival beyond the death of your host star. As awesome as cockroaches and crocodiles and viruses are, when the light goes out on Earth, they would all eventually perish along with it. But we may not.
The cosmological principle explains why you should expect to find remarkable coincidences in your own history if you are special. Humans are fairly anomalous among the species on earth in a way that our closest relatives are not. Chimps have a great deal in common with octopuses, coming from entirely separate evolutionary lines that both started from just barely complex life. Once complexity has been started, you would plausibly expect an arms race of sensory features and predator/prey dynamics. You wouldn’t necessarily expect human-like intelligence. The events that led to our evolution aren’t necessarily any more unlikely than the conditions for the advent of simple life, but the number of trials would be much lower, since only planets with complex intelligent life (on the order of animals) would be candidates for developing human-like intelligence.
Supposing that you are not special, on the other hand, is distinct from the cosmological principle. It’s not an explanation of why you’d expect to find remarkable history behind remarkable features. It’s an acknowledgement that the universe is fairly uniform, and even when events are exceedingly rare, you can find them with some regularity throughout the universe. Complex life, or even simple life, may be so rare that, like supernovas, you only expect to find them quite rarely, whether in terms of spatial distribution or infrequency. But even for incredibly rare events like that, you do expect to find them with some regularity throughout our old & vast universe.
In terms of intelligent life, which took several billion years to evolve, the universe is fairly young, and its likelihood could be extremely low even if simple life turns out to be abundant throughout our galaxy, without any cause for doubting that it happens every so often (on the scale of billions of years & galaxies).
Another reason why Earth may be relatively special as far as life-bearing planets go?
Yeah, and it’s called The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu. ;)
I am going to rant about news, and science news for a minute.
Ok
This is an article discussing a study with a link to a CNN article. This article basically parrots the information from the linked CNN story on this research.
The CNN story DOESN’T EVEN LINK TO THE CORRECT STUDY! It links to some other cardiac treatment overview paper. After I spent like 15 minutes trying to find the diet soda information in this study, I realized there is no way this could be correct. So I moved over to the AHA Journal focusion on strokes, and found the actual paper.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023100
Fucks sake people. You can tell it is pretty obvious the takeout.com article did not even read the paper it was referencing. This shit bothers me so much, because… as I guessed, the article was a mischaracterization of what the actual study data found. Which found that high consumption of ASB (artificially sweetened beverages) did not cause an increase in stroke incidence in individuals below a BMI of 30. They did find that African American women who consumed daily ASB’s also had a higher stroke risk as well. They did not find that correlation among other ethic groups.
This, to me, proves nothing, again. I annoys me to no end how news outlets can get research like this wrong. This study specifically does not use BMI as one of the control factors. We know increased BMI causes an increase in risk for stroke. We now know that increased BMI and drinking diet soda also has an increase in risk for stroke. The even more galling part of this is that the study is focusing exclusively on post-menopausal women. Neither the CNN or takeout article highlighted that much.
Anyway, it just bugs me that outlets take basically no time to read the article. Both articles say “after factoring in lifestyle elements” the stroke risk increases… but the paper isn’t using BMI as a lifestyle element. They even note that their results differ slightly from a previous study and caution using the study as some sort of proof of a correlation, as they admit they couldn’t control for all factors.
If you are going to write an article on a research paper, read the fucking paper. This one is easy too, It isn’t super long, and isn’t particularly hard to read.
Thank you. It’s absolutely maddening how this happens again and again with the non-science press. It’s as though they’ve just got some intern with no background skimming abstracts for key words or something, and while it’s most prevalent in health sciences it seems to happen across the board.