goognighz (u/goognighz)

goognighz commented on “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System skyatnightmagazine.com/ne... · Posted by u/fuidani

aardvark179 · a year ago

You seem to be conflating life, multicellular life, and intelligent life. Life appears to have developed on Earth pretty quickly, multicellular life took a long time to appear, and we are only aware of one species that developed civilisation building capabilities.

Life might be very common, but intelligent life still be incrediblY rare.

goognighz · a year ago

Intelligent life most like arose from the extinction level events that wiped out less intelligent super predators. This gave those who are far weaker but with higher brain capacity the chance to express their genetic variations.

goognighz commented on “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System skyatnightmagazine.com/ne... · Posted by u/fuidani

IsTom · a year ago

While it has more time to become a red giant, it'll become more luminous over time and life on Earth will be impossible much earlier. I've seen estimates of 0.5B to 1.5B years.

goognighz · a year ago

lol 0.5B to 1.5B is a pretty big difference. Sounds like we really don’t know what we are talking about.

goognighz commented on “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System skyatnightmagazine.com/ne... · Posted by u/fuidani

ta8645 · a year ago

If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise too, will come before too long.

If, on the other hand, life is relatively rare, or we're the sole example, our future can't be statistically estimated that way.

goognighz · a year ago

Dark forest hypothesis explains this in a “dark” way. They exist but are smart enough to hide from hostile hunter/predator life forms. Meanwhile our dumbasses are blasting radio signals into space like a little kid trying to talk to every stranger they see.

goognighz commented on “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System skyatnightmagazine.com/ne... · Posted by u/fuidani

seanhunter · a year ago

Firstly that is completely badass science. The idea that you can use observations to detect the chemical composition of an exoplanet millions of kilometres away is an absolute triumph of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Really amazing and deeply humbling to me.

Secondly, my prior was always that life existed outside of earth. It just seems so unlikely that we are somehow that special. If life developed here I always felt it overwhelmingly likely that it developed elsewhere too given how incredibly unfathomably vast the universe is.

goognighz · a year ago

Interestingly we can’t actually know that we are correct in our calculations of what a planet lightyears away has as its atmosphere because we will never be able to go there and make sure we are correct. It’s a calculation and nothing more. For all we know that planet may not even exist. That’s what’s mind blowing about astronomy. We really don’t have any way of proving anything about what we are observing. All we can say is we are observing. That’s the only thing science can offer us.