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I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

that's what the fermi paradox/drake equation are all about though: once your numbers get big enough even incredibly rare things start to pop up all over the place, so to resolve the paradox you either need a miracle (abiogenesis or multicellular organisms are super, super, super rare, maybe even to the point of actual uniqueness) or a "great filter" extinction event that all intelligent life, or all life in general tends towards (climate collapse, megaeruptions, gamma ray bursts, impact events, etc)

I think "time" is the correct answer for why we won't find anything or anyone while we're still, like, comprehensibly human. The longer we stick around, though, the longer we might at least find artifacts of extinct or transcended or whatever aliens. Post-post-post-post humans (if we manage to survive that long) might find modern human equivalent aliens, but that might only be as interesting as finding some ants in the park or something, and that might be happening now with aliens we don't have the ability to contact or maybe even perceive. Or there might be some sort of hard limit to how complex or interesting anyone or anything can get, and if that's true in some sense a long existence would probably see us meeting a few aliens, at least.

Anyway that's all to say that I think the real answer to the paradox is that things are weird out there and we're still in our infancy as a technological species.

I feel like this has been brought up in this thread before, but we haven't done a very thorough job of surveying the part of the galaxy that is visible to us and we don't really know what we're looking for beyond some extrapolations of our own situation. A lot of our current cues to look for are predicated on civilizations wanting to be visible or communicating with other star systems, but there's no reason to believe that another civilization would want to do those things. We don't really do those things, and they're not very cost-effective.

As much as it seems likely from our own experience that civilizations tend toward self-destruction on a timescale too brief to allow them to be observed, stuff like the Fermi paradox seems like a solution in search of a problem. Once we're able to understand what we see well enough to know for sure that there are no signs of civilization, if we're still around, then we can start entertaining it.

It's entirely possible that if we ever find other civilizations, the first will just be a chance occurrence that will give us enough of an idea what they're like that we can do a better job of finding other ones.

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mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through
once again, i understand how large numbers work.

the thing is though that you can be working with insanely huge datasets and if your necessary leaps are sufficiently rare none of it matters. until we find more evidence of life anywhere else it’s just as reasonable to suggest it’s happened a single time in our local cluster. like hurray it beat the odds here on earth.

none of this means i don’t think we should make a concerted effort to look or that it shouldn’t be in our minds as we observe unexplainable phenomena. but the general assumption made by a lot of people that the universe is so clearly just teeming with life i find to be pretty lacklustre. teeming with intelligent life even more so.

Pentecoastal Elites
Feb 27, 2007

The reason people are assuming abundant life is because of our sufficiently-observed area is infinitesimally small (and so can be discounted) and when looking at the history of Earth and life on it it doesn't seem like there's anything magical* that lead to us.
We know planets aren't rare, we even know that planets similarly sized to Earth that are within our habitable range (let alone the temperature range where the important chemistry still works) aren't that rare. We know that the constituent elements of life aren't particularly rare. Abiogenesis is pretty well established and it's got a lot of observational and experimental evidence in its favor. Even off of Earth -- we've found many of the more complex chemical precursors to life just floating around in space or on asteroids,. Unless we're missing something really, really important (Jupiter or the moon being weird, some extremely rare property of the sun or our position in the galaxy that we're not really considering) the conditions that took us from a cooling ball of rock to homo sapiens don't seem that special.

It's probably pretty easy to say that the conditions for life to arise are at least out there, and because the dataset is huge. If it happened here, it can probably happen somewhere else, unless there's something huge everybody's missing (which might be true). It's more reasonable to say that life is prevalent rather than unique because the only case against is that we haven't yet seen direct evidence of it, and the amount of time and space we've searched might as well be zero.

It's impossible to know if it's actually true or not today, obviously, but the odds seem to favor an inhabited galaxy.

* the most reasonable miraculous genesis theory to me was posted upthread, the idea that the development of eukaryota is so vanishingly rare that we'd expect to see a lot of simple replicators but few or no other multicellular (or equivalent) organisms, let alone life. I don't buy it (it was obviously an advantageous strategy) but it's, IMO, the most plausible and has some evidence in that we don't see multiple expressions of cellular development in our evolutionary history, to the best of our knowledge.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

The reason people are assuming abundant life is because of our sufficiently-observed area is infinitesimally small (and so can be discounted) and when looking at the history of Earth and life on it it doesn't seem like there's anything magical* that lead to us.
We know planets aren't rare, we even know that planets similarly sized to Earth that are within our habitable range (let alone the temperature range where the important chemistry still works) aren't that rare. We know that the constituent elements of life aren't particularly rare. Abiogenesis is pretty well established and it's got a lot of observational and experimental evidence in its favor.

It really doesn't.

And again, reasoning by analogy that "life is abundant on earth so it's abundant elsewhere" is one thing, but the Fermi paradox is specifically about intelligent, tool-using, complex etc. life, so the analogy needs to work the other way: despite the abundance of life on Earth, only one such species has arisen, which suggests that it is fantastically rare elsewhere.

Phanatic fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Mar 16, 2021

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

Also there’s evidence of bacteria on Earth from literally the moment that it first cooled, but complex life is less than a billion years old.

Also the Earth only has about a billion years left before the sun boils all our water away.

Are there any other species on the Earth that seem like they’re on the way to their own stone age, or might be if humans weren’t wrecking things up?

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through
i understand the theory of abiogenesis but your post makes it sound like it’s far more concrete and understood than it is. i’m not going to say i’m a massive biomolecule expert but i’m a deft hand in a molecular lab so it’s not like i’m new to this stuff.

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Also there’s evidence of bacteria on Earth from literally the moment that it first cooled, but complex life is less than a billion years old.

Also the Earth only has about a billion years left before the sun boils all our water away.

Are there any other species on the Earth that seem like they’re on the way to their own stone age, or might be if humans weren’t wrecking things up?

no. that’s not really something we can guess anyway. it all happens so very slowly and it’s important to remember evolution isn’t about superiority or advancement; that things evolve to their niches, and were humans to die there’s no real pressure for something to “rise up” and replace us.

there’s extremely perfunctory tool usage. some animals have tight social bonds. there is some evidence for protolanguage. but generally speaking, humans are unique in many ways.

Phyzzle
Jan 26, 2008
Yes, while we just have one location to go on, we do have some timing observations.

Life developed about as soon as conditions allowed. Social, cooperative behavior seems to develop a lot whenever possible. (As in, a lot. There are multiple species of solitary wasps and spiders that are evolving to become social creatures right now.) Increasing intelligence is not rare, since there are several species that independently became more intelligent than any of their ancestors. (Perhaps language is a final chunk of intelligence that requires some specific brain structure that is somehow very unlikely to form.)

Complex life, with Eukaryotic, multicellular creatures developed, oh, about 2 billion years after conditions allowed. A few billion years here, a few billion years there, and maybe no other planet in the galaxy has yet made it past that bottleneck. Maybe the success of multicellular animal life was founded on the fluke early development of sexual reproduction. Sexually reproducing plants came only late in the dinosaur era, after maybe half a billion years of large plant growth. What I don’t get is why eukaryotic life in particular would take so long. Cooperation is such a common development, even for microbes.
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=129976

Separately, there might not be that many available places; while Earth-sized planets might not be rare, the really Earth-like planets might still be rare.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/our-solar-system-is-even-stranger-than-we-thought/
The mechanics of solar system development might need a combination of gas giants and Earth-sized worlds to clear out meteorites in a timely way. The level of heavy radioactive materials might not have been high enough until a few billion years ago. (You need radioactive materials to have a molten core and a magnetic field to protect from solar wind.)

spacetoaster
Feb 10, 2014

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Are there any other species on the Earth that seem like they’re on the way to their own stone age, or might be if humans weren’t wrecking things up?

quote:

Scientists have discovered the first evidence of a non-human species changing the way it uses instruments to process its food. In a remote part of Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park lives a species of capuchin monkey. Scientists said these beasties have left an archaeological record a bit like our own, dumping the tools they have used over the past three millennia on the forest floor.

Roughly 3,000 years ago, they first began using quartz stones to crack open seeds or fruits. Then at some point about 300 years ago, they began using larger rocks to smash open tougher foodstuffs like cashew nuts. The initial discovery of capuchin monkeys using tools was announced last year, but the new research is the first to identify changes in the way the animals use their stone implements.

‘The human archaeological record changes over time,’ a team from University College London said in their report. ‘We identify monkey stone tools between 2,400 and 3,000 years old and, on the basis of metric and damage patterns, demonstrate that capuchin food processing changed between [approximately] 2,400 and 300 years ago, and between [roughly] 100 years ago and the present day. ‘We present the first example of long-term tool-use variation outside of the human lineage, and discuss possible mechanisms of extended behavioural change.’

Humanity doesn’t have much to worry about the capuchins just now, because the beasts reach a maximum height of under two feet and haven’t worked out how to design guns or any other technology which would compete with our own weaponry. However, we might have to watch out for the monkeys in a few million years time. The human Stone Age lasted more than three million years and ended between 8700 BC and 2000 BC. If the monkeys follow a similar evolutionary process to humans, they will develop nuclear weapons at some point after the year 3,500,000.

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through

that's awesome, though the last paragraph is kind of dumb

also, i like the implication that because they're 2 feet tall they will never achieve anything, haha.

anyway cool science

Speleothing
May 6, 2008

Spare batteries are pretty key.
There are at least five modern wild animal groups that have a sort of intelligence and society.

Whales, dolphins, primates, corvids, & parrots.

Sounds like an evolutionary trait that comes up from time to time. And that's not counting the social animals that aren't very smart or the smart animals that aren't social.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.
I’ll believe monkeys can use tools when I hear one swearing like a sailor because he just dropped the twig-extender down the header pipe.

Seth Pecksniff
May 27, 2004

can't believe shrek is fucking dead. rip to a real one.

Stairmaster posted:

Such a thing might be seen as a natural phenomena. Do you think ants recognize that skyscrapers are artificial

Dude

I just

I need a minute

Pope Hilarius II
Nov 10, 2008

Speleothing posted:

There are at least five modern wild animal groups that have a sort of intelligence and society.

Whales, dolphins, primates, corvids, & parrots.

Sounds like an evolutionary trait that comes up from time to time. And that's not counting the social animals that aren't very smart or the smart animals that aren't social.

How social are cephalopods?

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Pope Hilarius II posted:

How social are cephalopods?

Not at all. They're smart as gently caress but have basically no society.

(If someone knows otherwise I'd love to hear about it because I think they're awesome.)

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through
nah this is true, though i don't think any of the above are really on their way to a stone age homo-level society. there are several groups of animals that use occasional tools and pass on learned behaviours, though, all the same.

one thing with the cephalopods is that the vast majority has very short lifespans especially as compared to their assumed intelligence. the majority don't live past a couple of years.

a set of researchers found that it might be related to their optic pathways, at least in motherpuses. there was one experiment where one of these related nerves was removed and not only did the octomom lose her maternal affection, but her lifespan was increased.

Speleothing
May 6, 2008

Spare batteries are pretty key.
Primates have already achieved stone age technology. In fact, the primates did it so long ago that they've even achieved space age technology

mycomancy
Oct 16, 2016
Apes together strong

Pope Hilarius II
Nov 10, 2008

Another thing that occurred to me: isn't a barrier to, say, cetacean tool development that they could never master fire? Seems like a pretty big requirement to develop advanced tools.

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mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through

Pope Hilarius II posted:

Another thing that occurred to me: isn't a barrier to, say, cetacean tool development that they could never master fire? Seems like a pretty big requirement to develop advanced tools.

i think we talked about this in another thread but one potential way around that would be to use underwater thermal vents or volcanoes. it would be difficult but we're discussing theoretical possibilities, welp

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