Well, you've convinced me to read some of Nick Lane, if for no other reason than to learn more about biochemistry. I know so much already, ha, ha! (Not). The whole Fermi question is indeed intriguing. You might find David Kipping's YouTube channel interesting. He has an interesting mathematical angle on this topic "Crowded or Lonely"...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6-9Hq8dV_4
Despite all our dreams, the third Great Filter might just be that is not that easy to get out of the planetary system.
Thanks for the series. But every time I read about all this I end up with the same troubled feeling: I'm almost certain that I will die without having an answer for this, or without knowing how things will end up happening.
Eliminate the manned space exploration entirely, and put more money in unmanned missions... All this money and resources wasted on the space station and trying to get people back to the Moon and eventually to Mars... ugh, it just drives me up the walls... We may well be stuck in our solar system, but we can explore the heck out of it and the entire universe just by using machines... isn't that enough for the brainy baboons that we are?
What if we do not have to get out of the planetary system? What if there is another way? Why think only linearly and within the confines of known scientific theory?
But that defies everything we have ever learned over the millennia. Each pioneer, such as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and so on, have stopped "hanging on" and moved ahead. Science itself is a great tool and method, but scientists are stuck in the mire of academic doldrums. The only way we progress is by stepping out of the muck instead of clinging to what we have. Does that make sense or no?
Enceladus at ~-200c is an ice covered moon, with tremendous cryovolcanic activity. Beneath the surface potentially a vast single ocean, and at the southern pole, warmer bands or stripes of a dizzying -80c, the cause possibly thermal vents like those one Earth. Perhaps life is possible at -80c, even intelligent life. I'd imagine such creatures, if they existed, would have thoughts that form at a glacial pace, and resolve with brilliant clarity. Enceladusians (I discovered them and gave them a trad name, apols.) now exist. They are aware of us, they've seen Voyager go by, they hear the radio signals we send out, including our music. They love German Lieder, Bach and some Mozart. They can't stand Wagner. But the key to understanding them is their love of 90's East Coast Hip-Hop. DJ Premier is accorded divine status.
Fascinating. I'm with Nick Lane, I think - it just requires too many things to come together and then develop in the right way. I rather like the idea that Life could be the result of a series of maybe never to be repeated coincidences.
That Cole picture - he has a very gloomy view of Manhood. He must have been depressed.
One possible filter you don't mention that I think could be important is the oxygenation of the atmosphere. Oxygen availability is a prerequisite for respiration, which is a big step up for energy ability and probably a prerequisite for multicellular animals. Oxygenation was an eventual consequence of the evolution of photosynthesis. And the evolution of photosynthesis took quite a while -- it could be less likely than the evolution of life in the first place, and comparable to the improbability of endosymbiosis. We don't really know.
Excellent point, and you’re absolutely right that oxygen was necessary for the step up in energy ability. But I do wonder if with the abundance of carbon dioxide that would be necessary for life to begin in the first place, whether some form of photosynthesis would always arise, given the benefits it would confer to the innovators. But as you say, we don’t know.
This is a very sensible "solution" to the Fermi paradox. Another is to simply look directly at the SETI equation itself, immediately recognize that we have no way whatever to determine the probability of one of the variables, and then realize that the other variables don't matter any: the answer has to be "we don't know whether any other life is out there since we have found it exactly once so far."
People who read this too quickly might knee-jerk and want to make counter-arguments, but there aren't any.
Oh! I do NOT wish to give the impression that I'm not curious. I just want to point out that a lot of folks assume there absolutely have to be loads of other critters out there because there's a lot of space, or some of the other elements of life. I'm just saying we can't actually conclude that at all. Sorry - visiting my folks this week and very much hopping in and out of a lot of conversations, so apologies if I've given an impression I didn't mean to give - that's all me.
In reference to this topic of alien life, when do you think the narrative will finally change?
Nearly 4 million Americans have reported that they have been abducted by alien beings. I don't know what the worldwide figure is. UFOs have become an everyday occurrence over the skies of every nation. And now various departments of the US government have admitted to the existence of extraterrestrial and interdimensional beings, and have admitted to the existence of non-human entities and aerial and submarine craft. Fighter pilots, airline pilots, astronauts, engineers, government agents, and other experts have openly encountered vehicles that defy everything we know to be human-made. So why do we keep reverting to this question of "if" — if and whether alien forms exist? We just keep questioning the proverbial finger pointing at the moon and we never progress from here in the scientific sense.
Is our inability to progress based on the limitations of scientific thinking? It seems this is so. Science has a methodology, but scientists have placed themselves in a mental box, afraid to admit the now-obvious. What used to be considered crazy or delusional has now been admitted and explained by experts in the know, yet the discussion constantly ignores what people are experiencing with their own five senses.
Ah see I think this is a bit of a misconception. We absolutely do not need 4 billion years of environmental stability. The early earth’s environment was incredibly different to the one we have now! No oxygen, no land, incredibly acidic oceans, was wracked by asteroid bombardments — yet life emerged deep in the ocean, precisely because of the thermodynamic disequilibrium; chemistry happens when things need to change to get to their most stable state. Also the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs didn’t kill all complex life, just the biggest animals. I don’t think plate tectonics were vital for life to arise here, though they may have helped with the formation of the vents as their movement may have been exposing new olivine to seawater, but perhaps enough would have been exposed to get life started without the movement. Think it’s a moot point anyway as there’s no reason other planets roughly Earth’s size shouldn’t have a mantle and crust — Venus does, for example. The longest period in the life cycle of stars is the most stable state, so that shouldn’t be a limiting factor — main sequence stars are everywhere. Atmosphere yes — but only for the carbon dioxide, which is one of the three ingredients anyway.
Extremophile microorganisms are able to survive in freezing cold, blistering heat, radioactive conditions, acid or alkaline, and so on. Once life gets a foothold, it seems extremely difficult to kill off entirely! Which is very cool!
I think mars and venus nicely illustrate the thesis actually: both were initially hospitable for life but changed on a relatively short timescale to no longer be so. Even if microbial life survives on mars, it ain't becoming multicellular anytime soon. Furthermore, planetary suitability for multicellular life is much more variable, and we can expect that massive events like planetary freezes (which happened twice in the past billion years on earth) will knock back or destroy muticellular life entirely. Another open question is how active planetary volcanism typically is. Crustal resurfacing and really big magma plumes can dramatically change the planetary environment (as we see with the end-Permian extinction) and it could be that stability of the sort needed for multicellular life to stick around for hundreds of millions of years is rare.
You do make a good point about Mars and Venus. I do hold out a bit of hope we’ll discover bacteria-like fossils on Mars at some point, but yeah totally concede that their current state would not be hospitable to the emergence of complex life.
Thanks, Jacob — it is such a fun topic to debate! Very interesting point on the tectonics, i’ll check that article out. Have been thinking about doing a post about what it would actually take to kill all life off on Earth, as a thought experiment (not an evil master plan!)
Well, you've convinced me to read some of Nick Lane, if for no other reason than to learn more about biochemistry. I know so much already, ha, ha! (Not). The whole Fermi question is indeed intriguing. You might find David Kipping's YouTube channel interesting. He has an interesting mathematical angle on this topic "Crowded or Lonely"...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6-9Hq8dV_4
I’ll check that out, thanks!
Space is too damn big. One planet was bound to get lucky.
For now, it’ll have to do!
Despite all our dreams, the third Great Filter might just be that is not that easy to get out of the planetary system.
Thanks for the series. But every time I read about all this I end up with the same troubled feeling: I'm almost certain that I will die without having an answer for this, or without knowing how things will end up happening.
Too late to explore the world, too early to explore the stars. ☹️
I’m hopeful we could find bacteria-like life somewhere in the solar system in our lifetimes, but we’d to really step up our space programs.
Eliminate the manned space exploration entirely, and put more money in unmanned missions... All this money and resources wasted on the space station and trying to get people back to the Moon and eventually to Mars... ugh, it just drives me up the walls... We may well be stuck in our solar system, but we can explore the heck out of it and the entire universe just by using machines... isn't that enough for the brainy baboons that we are?
What if we do not have to get out of the planetary system? What if there is another way? Why think only linearly and within the confines of known scientific theory?
Because, until we have something else to hang on to, the confines of known scientific theory are all we have.
But that defies everything we have ever learned over the millennia. Each pioneer, such as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and so on, have stopped "hanging on" and moved ahead. Science itself is a great tool and method, but scientists are stuck in the mire of academic doldrums. The only way we progress is by stepping out of the muck instead of clinging to what we have. Does that make sense or no?
Great series and many avenues open for exploration. Cheers!
This was fantastic, thank you
Your question is answered in depth by the documentary series “Men in Black.”
They are among us and have given us Velcro.
Zoom out far enough and we’re all just ants on a galactic marble, ready for the next game
I heard that and I’m like, oh wow, man.
But I do treat cockroaches with a lot more respect now that I know the truth.
Enceladus at ~-200c is an ice covered moon, with tremendous cryovolcanic activity. Beneath the surface potentially a vast single ocean, and at the southern pole, warmer bands or stripes of a dizzying -80c, the cause possibly thermal vents like those one Earth. Perhaps life is possible at -80c, even intelligent life. I'd imagine such creatures, if they existed, would have thoughts that form at a glacial pace, and resolve with brilliant clarity. Enceladusians (I discovered them and gave them a trad name, apols.) now exist. They are aware of us, they've seen Voyager go by, they hear the radio signals we send out, including our music. They love German Lieder, Bach and some Mozart. They can't stand Wagner. But the key to understanding them is their love of 90's East Coast Hip-Hop. DJ Premier is accorded divine status.
I trust you because of your profile picture
I’m sad enough I had to edit the reply to improve how it read.
Fascinating. I'm with Nick Lane, I think - it just requires too many things to come together and then develop in the right way. I rather like the idea that Life could be the result of a series of maybe never to be repeated coincidences.
That Cole picture - he has a very gloomy view of Manhood. He must have been depressed.
See it every day mate.
They walk among us
Nice post, very clear.
One possible filter you don't mention that I think could be important is the oxygenation of the atmosphere. Oxygen availability is a prerequisite for respiration, which is a big step up for energy ability and probably a prerequisite for multicellular animals. Oxygenation was an eventual consequence of the evolution of photosynthesis. And the evolution of photosynthesis took quite a while -- it could be less likely than the evolution of life in the first place, and comparable to the improbability of endosymbiosis. We don't really know.
Excellent point, and you’re absolutely right that oxygen was necessary for the step up in energy ability. But I do wonder if with the abundance of carbon dioxide that would be necessary for life to begin in the first place, whether some form of photosynthesis would always arise, given the benefits it would confer to the innovators. But as you say, we don’t know.
We see many a strange thing in the skies in the Andes.
This is a very sensible "solution" to the Fermi paradox. Another is to simply look directly at the SETI equation itself, immediately recognize that we have no way whatever to determine the probability of one of the variables, and then realize that the other variables don't matter any: the answer has to be "we don't know whether any other life is out there since we have found it exactly once so far."
People who read this too quickly might knee-jerk and want to make counter-arguments, but there aren't any.
Where’s your spirit of curiosity, Andrew?
Oh! I do NOT wish to give the impression that I'm not curious. I just want to point out that a lot of folks assume there absolutely have to be loads of other critters out there because there's a lot of space, or some of the other elements of life. I'm just saying we can't actually conclude that at all. Sorry - visiting my folks this week and very much hopping in and out of a lot of conversations, so apologies if I've given an impression I didn't mean to give - that's all me.
No worries at all, Andrew! You’re right we definitely can’t know for sure, but I like to dream!
In reference to this topic of alien life, when do you think the narrative will finally change?
Nearly 4 million Americans have reported that they have been abducted by alien beings. I don't know what the worldwide figure is. UFOs have become an everyday occurrence over the skies of every nation. And now various departments of the US government have admitted to the existence of extraterrestrial and interdimensional beings, and have admitted to the existence of non-human entities and aerial and submarine craft. Fighter pilots, airline pilots, astronauts, engineers, government agents, and other experts have openly encountered vehicles that defy everything we know to be human-made. So why do we keep reverting to this question of "if" — if and whether alien forms exist? We just keep questioning the proverbial finger pointing at the moon and we never progress from here in the scientific sense.
Is our inability to progress based on the limitations of scientific thinking? It seems this is so. Science has a methodology, but scientists have placed themselves in a mental box, afraid to admit the now-obvious. What used to be considered crazy or delusional has now been admitted and explained by experts in the know, yet the discussion constantly ignores what people are experiencing with their own five senses.
https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/19082_PART_II___Believing_That_One_Has_Been_Kidnapped_by_Extraterrestrials.pdf
Ah see I think this is a bit of a misconception. We absolutely do not need 4 billion years of environmental stability. The early earth’s environment was incredibly different to the one we have now! No oxygen, no land, incredibly acidic oceans, was wracked by asteroid bombardments — yet life emerged deep in the ocean, precisely because of the thermodynamic disequilibrium; chemistry happens when things need to change to get to their most stable state. Also the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs didn’t kill all complex life, just the biggest animals. I don’t think plate tectonics were vital for life to arise here, though they may have helped with the formation of the vents as their movement may have been exposing new olivine to seawater, but perhaps enough would have been exposed to get life started without the movement. Think it’s a moot point anyway as there’s no reason other planets roughly Earth’s size shouldn’t have a mantle and crust — Venus does, for example. The longest period in the life cycle of stars is the most stable state, so that shouldn’t be a limiting factor — main sequence stars are everywhere. Atmosphere yes — but only for the carbon dioxide, which is one of the three ingredients anyway.
Extremophile microorganisms are able to survive in freezing cold, blistering heat, radioactive conditions, acid or alkaline, and so on. Once life gets a foothold, it seems extremely difficult to kill off entirely! Which is very cool!
I think mars and venus nicely illustrate the thesis actually: both were initially hospitable for life but changed on a relatively short timescale to no longer be so. Even if microbial life survives on mars, it ain't becoming multicellular anytime soon. Furthermore, planetary suitability for multicellular life is much more variable, and we can expect that massive events like planetary freezes (which happened twice in the past billion years on earth) will knock back or destroy muticellular life entirely. Another open question is how active planetary volcanism typically is. Crustal resurfacing and really big magma plumes can dramatically change the planetary environment (as we see with the end-Permian extinction) and it could be that stability of the sort needed for multicellular life to stick around for hundreds of millions of years is rare.
You do make a good point about Mars and Venus. I do hold out a bit of hope we’ll discover bacteria-like fossils on Mars at some point, but yeah totally concede that their current state would not be hospitable to the emergence of complex life.
Thanks, Jacob — it is such a fun topic to debate! Very interesting point on the tectonics, i’ll check that article out. Have been thinking about doing a post about what it would actually take to kill all life off on Earth, as a thought experiment (not an evil master plan!)