Discussion
Is the lack of contact with non-terrestrial civilisations more about our sense of importance (they must be hear because we are) than any real appreciation of the timescales & coincidence for two civilisations to co-exist in the universe.... of course equally, aliens may have had a look & then decided to quarantine the area because we don't look very civilised to them?
h/t Guardian letters
@ChrisMayLA6 Sigh. There's a whole body of theory associated with this field, from the Drake Equation on: a useful term to search around is "Great Filter", and whether we've come through a GF or have still to face one makes a huge difference to the notional situation.
(My gut feeling is that unicellular life is probably extremely common, but sapient tool users are vanishingly rare/distant, and ones who can travel to other star systems are even more so, if they exist at all.)
@cstross @ChrisMayLA6 I suspect the solution to the Fermi "paradox" is probably that nearly all life fails to evolve beyond simple prokaryotic cells even in ideal conditions. Because there's no inherent drive in evolution towards increasing complexity. 🤷🏻♂️
You don't even get multicellular life until something so astronomically unlikely occurs (the eukaryotic revolution) that it took 2 billion years to happen even on Earth, and so far doesn't appear to have occurred anywhere else in the universe.
@ApostateEnglishman @ChrisMayLA6 Bear in mind one possible explanation for why the eukaryotic revolution took so long is that it took billions of years for the Moon to spiral far enough away from Earth (due to tidal drag) for the initial 70 metre six-hourly tides to subside, which tended to smash anything more complex than a prokaryote to pieces on coastal rocks. We don't know: there are too many variables.
@cstross @ChrisMayLA6 That's an extraordinarily good point that I hadn't considered! Thank you.
@cstross @ChrisMayLA6 that’d be my guess but at very low confidence. Far too much we don’t know. Could be whole swathes of life we can’t recognise.
@Colman @ChrisMayLA6 We already know that there's a huge amount of biota lurking underground in the crust—not photosynthetic, unicellular, often obligate anaerobes—and I expect other rocky planets orbiting in the triple phase zone for water to be similar, especially if they have a tectonic subduction system stirred up by a large moon.
That set of conditions is rare but hardly likely to be uniquely so.
@cstross @ChrisMayLA6 oh, I assume that unicellular life or something like it is everywhere it can be. The rest I’m not so sure about.
If simple life isn’t everywhere there’s something special about Earth.
Oooor, as in Hinduism, whatever Alan Watts preaches, and the DMT experience, we are all but manifestation of a divine sentience that's made a little video game called 'matter', and been poking through it. The universe is the dream of the Godhead, and it/we didn't see it fit to dream itself more than one planet until we contemplates that possibility. UAPs more likely extra dimensional than extraterrestrial.
And now, Tom with the weather.
@cstross @ChrisMayLA6
My favoured theory is the ones who fall prey to an infinite growth, consumption and expansion delusion don't last long, and ones that advance in the quality of life and resilience may last long enough to overlap with others, but are pretty quiet in detectable energy use, because noise is waste.
@petealexharris @ChrisMayLA6 Yep, exactly. Detecting Earth by its radio noise has actually got much harder since peaking in the 1970s—the big BMEWS radars have shut down and our old AM/SW/LW transmitters are dead as everything switches to low power but very high bandwidth cellular technologies. And so on.
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