Poll of the Day > Earth is such a weird anomaly in the universe

(+) Yeah! (+)

Life is so weird to only happen on such a small amount of planets, every planet has rocks and weather and stuff, but they don't get life.

The fact we even developed to be sentient is weird, the universe is otherwise just full of non sentient rocks. How did it even start becoming something other than rocks? Why are we sentient?

And then what if we never became a planet with life? We got incredibly lucky to host life. Imagine the universe had no life, why would it even be there?
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Lets say
1/1,000,000 planetary bodies have the right conditions to sustain life

1/1,000,000 will get life, and then 1/1,000,000 will get intelligent life after that, even with ose numbers life should be fairly common
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Thats with made up numbers though

Outside of earth our data is 0 planets have it

Out of every observed planet we've seen 0 that have structures built by life, none have advanced to human level sentience life
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Lootman posted...

Thats with made up numbers though

Outside of earth our data is 0 planets have it

Out of every observed planet we've seen 0 that have structures built by life, none have advanced to human level sentience life

Well we have only seen like 8 planets up close, every other planet that has been "discovered" is only there in theory.
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I want to add we think we have seen two stars that may have a dyson sphere being built around it, though no way to prove it with current technology, if we can prove that these stars have planets or a planet in the habitual zone there is a high chance there is life on it.
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doesn't mean there aren't other planets with life
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Some of the Kepler Planets definitely have life on them.

Lootman posted...

Ogurisama posted...

Lets say
1/1,000,000 planetary bodies have the right conditions to sustain life

1/1,000,000 will get life, and then 1/1,000,000 will get intelligent life after that, even with ose numbers life should be fairly common

Thats with made up numbers though

This is the real problem.

Every argument that is predicated on the idea of "There are so many planets in the universe, there must be tons that are capable of supporting life, therefore the odds are high that at least a few of them support life" is inherently flawed, because we have literally NO idea what the odds of life actually developing ARE, nor what the odds are of that life evolving to anything resembling sentience, or that evolving to a point of any level of technology or civilization, nor space-faring, nor the average "half-life" of any advanced civilization, etc.

So things like the Drake Equation are fine as a thought experiment to consider what aspects are necessary for extraterrestrial life to exist, but the moment you start plugging numbers into those variables and start spitting out answers you're pretty much objectively wrong.

We simply don't know enough to make definitive statements. It's possible that the odds of life evolving are so astronomically infinitesimal that WE shouldn't even exist. It's possible that life is relatively common, but spread out so far that it would be incredibly unlikely to ever actually run INTO another alien race (which is the flip side of the "there are a lot of planets in space" coin). It's also possible that life is such a common thing that there's secretly an alien federation out there just waiting for us to develop space flight and make First Contact.

It's even possible that sociological factors result in most advanced civilizations going into "hiding" soon after developing advanced technology, meaning they'd become undetectable even if they WERE there and close enough to "see". Or that the age of the universe and the amount of time necessary for any form of life to advance to a sapient and technological level of evolution means that even if there will EVENTUALLY be other forms of life, we're still the first race to actually REACH that milestone (SOMEONE has to be first, after all), and thus, still "alone" in the universe right now.

(Hell, maybe some other race is going to eventually evolve, develop space flight, and explore the universe, and WE are going to be THEIR Forerunners/Precursors/Progenitors/Prometheans/Ancients/First Ones/etc., as they find the unexplained ruins we've left behind after we die out.)

There are a LOT of variables involved, and we don't really have numerical values for most of them. Even if we CAN estimate the age of the universe and the potentially likely number of planets in it (which is still just an educated guess), and fudge out the likelihood of any of those planets being capable of supporting life (which is even more hypothetical guesswork), we have literally ZERO knowledge of just how likely the formation and development of life are statistically, nor the likelihood of that life developing beyond the bacterial level, whether "non-carbon" life is even possible, and if so, how it would skew the numbers, and so on.

We can basically sort of half-ass the first half or so of the Drake Equation, but the rest of it is pure guessing.


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Like PO is saying, how many stars have planets in their habitable zones? The number is a lot fewer than you'd expect, and due to the laws of physics we generally know very little about the couple of potential earthlike planets.

There's a subreddit on a specific star that I sometimes read, learning about this potentially unknown extrasolar occurrence is pretty cool. Theories say that it could have been made by an intelligent civilization (however unlikely):
https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Or that the age of the universe and the amount of time necessary for any form of life to advance to a sapient and technological level of evolution means that even if there will EVENTUALLY be other forms of life, we're still the first race to actually REACH that milestone (SOMEONE has to be first, after all), and thus, still "alone" in the universe right now.

To be honest, it would really suck if we were the first sentient lifeforms in the universe. You are right and that someone quite literally HAS to be first to get there but I would imagine that no species would want to be that one. All alone. Even we keep looking for aliens because we expect there to be some. There's just no way that we could be first… Or so we think.
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Life is strange. I want all the answers but I know I won't get them.

Yes random poster on the internet, there is absolutely no life of any kind on other planets.
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aDirtyShisno posted...

To be honest, it would really suck if we were the first sentient lifeforms in the universe. You are right and that someone quite literally HAS to be first to get there but I would imagine that no species would want to be that one. All alone. Even we keep looking for aliens because we expect there to be some.

Conversely, that might be the best race to be, because you'd be the only one who would automatically be safe from some other conquering race coming along and wiping you out or enslaving you. Or having the still-functioning war-machines of a long-dead race finally track you down to kill/harvest you based on ancient, obsolete programming. Or having some grand galactic civilization deem you unworthy to join their perfect society and sterilize you into extinction. And so on.

(And suddenly, I strangely find myself compelled to post THIS link! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen) )

Even if we're assuming any given Precursor race is theoretically benign, you'd still have the danger of them dying off and leaving their doomsday super-weapons and technology just laying around where younger races eventually stumble across it (which is sort of one of the main concerns with how we dispose of nuclear waste today - namely, how we can keep potential future human civilizations safe from accidentally finding and exposing it). But that's also assuming that any civilization could realistically leave ruins behind that would last for any significant period of time - as per Life After People, nearly every single trace that humans ever existed as a technological species will be more or less erased by time and weather within only about 10000 years or so if we all up and disappeared tomorrow - with only our space garbage potentially lasting longer (but even that isn't guaranteed). We might not be the FIRST race in the universe... we might actually be one of the later races and STILL be more or less alone, as the other races may have lived and died already, with all trace of their existence more or less eroded away.

The universe is a huge place, made even more vast when you start factoring in Time as a separate dimension of measurement. Imagine someone from Paris trying to track down someone from New York, in a world where there's no Internet or global communication grid to use to track them, while knowing absolutely nothing other than their name and having a vague idea of what they look like. Now imagine trying to find that New Yorker when they were born in 1850 while the Parisian was born in 1950.

That's basically what looking for intelligent life in the universe is like. Even if it's out there, there's a good chance we'll never find each other.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

aDirtyShisno posted...

To be honest, it would really suck if we were the first sentient lifeforms in the universe. You are right and that someone quite literally HAS to be first to get there but I would imagine that no species would want to be that one. All alone. Even we keep looking for aliens because we expect there to be some.

Conversely, that might be the best race to be, because you'd be the only one who would automatically be safe from some other conquering race coming along and wiping you out or enslaving you. Or having the still-functioning war-machines of a long-dead race finally track you down to kill/harvest you based on ancient, obsolete programming. Or having some grand galactic civilization deem you unworthy to join their perfect society and sterilize you into extinction. And so on.

(And suddenly, I strangely find myself compelled to post THIS link! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen) )

Even if we're assuming any given Precursor race is theoretically benign, you'd still have the danger of them dying off and leaving their doomsday super-weapons and technology just laying around where younger races eventually stumble across it (which is sort of one of the main concerns with how we dispose of nuclear waste today - namely, how we can keep potential future human civilizations safe from accidentally finding and exposing it). But that's also assuming that any civilization could realistically leave ruins behind that would last for any significant period of time - as per Life After People, nearly every single trace that humans ever existed as a technological species will be more or less erased by time and weather within only about 10000 years or so if we all up and disappeared tomorrow - with only our space garbage potentially lasting longer (but even that isn't guaranteed). We might not be the FIRST race in the universe... we might actually be one of the later races and STILL be more or less alone, as the other races may have lived and died already, with all trace of their existence more or less eroded away.

The universe is a huge place, made even more vast when you start factoring in Time as a separate dimension of measurement. Imagine someone from Paris trying to track down someone from New York, in a world where there's no Internet or global communication grid to use to track them, while knowing absolutely nothing other than their name and having a vague idea of what they look like. Now imagine trying to find that New Yorker when they were born in 1850 while the Parisian was born in 1950.

That's basically what looking for intelligent life in the universe is like. Even if it's out there, there's a good chance we'll never find each other.

I really enjoyed reading this post.. it does make a lot of sense and pretty hard to argue with.

Or, what if life itself is a simulation being run by a super highly intelligent (godlike) and they programmed it so that we are alone in this made up universe?
Or what if the alien itself does not want to expand outward into space, but rather inward making their own simulation and simultaneously hiding themself from other race that want their race to die?
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The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

Action53 posted...

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

-Abraham Lincoln
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