Best I can think, is that this means the universe must be full of life, mostly in the form of single cell organisms. I'm sure there's more to this though. Thoughts?
Posted Sep 14, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC
Commonality of life may be inversely proportionate to the complexity of life.
im sorry im not that smart i really dont get the sentence u wrote but it sounds fascinating. an ELI5 please!
the more complex the life, the rarer it is.
And the other way around too.
The universe may be mostly single celled things, with a smattering of more complex things, and very few like us.
Hey, if this is life, we still don't know some important stuff like if it is single or multicellular, if words like prokaryote and eukaryote are relevant, how many species there might be...
We don't even know if it HAS cells.
Extremophiles, archaea or bacteria analogues, et al, may be more plentiful than we've previously thought, but that doesn't make the conditions for complex life more common, only that the conditions for simple life may be more common. It may mean that because small life can exist in more environments that complex life could take forms more unlike our own, but it may also mean absolutely nothing for the Drake equation.
It also doesn't change much about the concept of a great filter, which has more to do with the end of intelligent civilizations than anything else.
Since single-celled organisms are a prerequisite for most forms (that we have in mind) of intelligent life, I strongly disagree with you--finding out those conditions are more common necessarily also increases the probability of intelligent life. Even if you think the probability of, for example, intelligent life evolving in the clouds of Venus is remote, it's still got to be higher if there turn out to already be bacteria there. The idea that this could "mean nothing" for theories like the Great Filter is very hard for me to understand.
We all know that life on Venus died off because the Forerunners fired the Halo Array...
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It should be noted that the USSR sent close to 20 probes to Venus from 1961 to 1984.
If there's life on Venus, it's possible that we brought it there.
Well, the great filter deals with civilisation levels, so there's definitely no impact there.
Well, the great filter is either before our time or after. It could be the rarity of environmental conditions, the jump of life starting, the jump of multicellular organisms, the jump of language & generational knowledge, etc.
Or, it could be ahead of us (weapons of mass destruction, climate change, etc)
Well, yes, and there may actually be multiple of them. However, the great filter is, iirc, defined as something a civilisation has to get past to survive. A cloud of bacteria is not a civilisation.
Well, a civilization starts as a cloud of bacteria at some point early in the evolution that eventually leads to it. So a filter at that stage can still block a civilization from arising later.
True enough, I don't interpret it that way, but you could be right 🙂
Or it doesn't exist. The only reason people think there must be a great filter if alien life is common is they assume advanced civilizations would want to contact us. There's really no reason to assume that.
As is there no reason to assume that if they wouldn't that means they hate us somehow or look down on us like we would animals
It could mean a lot of things. We (usually) don't allow anyone to mess with uncontacted tribes, and it's for their protection, not because we hate them.
We really can't predict how advanced alien civilizations would behave, any more than a cave man could predict what the civilizations of 21st century would be like. So it's best not to make any assumptions.
Fair enough, but we also send out signals and listen for them.
IMO, if there is intelligent alien life, and they're not interested in communicating with us, that's just another filter.
The way I see it, is there's overwhelming odds for other life to exist in the universe, while underwhelming evidence of other life in the universe. Something unknown to us is leading to this disparity.
As far as I'm aware, the Great Filter is anything that prevents life from reaching high levels of civilisation. One that prevents life from forming would account as one. So I think it would be relevant in this case, since it could remove (or strenghen the argument against) some Earth particularties as great filters for the appearance of life as complex as it would exist in Venus. Obviously, it wouldn't affect possible Great Filters at latter stages or any Great Filter where the Solar System could be an exception.
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Life on Venus would be terrible news, Great Filter - wise. It would make the Great Filter much more likely to be either the evolution of intelligent, space-faring life, or something in our future that we haven't overcome yet. That's no bueno.
I think that's right. I don't think many people understand that.
We would then be looking into the differences between other life in the solar system. If there are nucleotides, phospholipids, peptidoglycans, enzymes or more complex biomolecules and structures, then we start looking for the parallels on earth.
From there we start looking at periods of time that suggest transferance, assuming such processes aren't relatively continuous. We can automatically assume that the different environments select for different traits. The histories will differ, but we would reasonably expect for their to be intersections.
Subsequently, the search would be on to discover trace fossils. These might not be of the organisms themselves, but preserve examples of the effects they might have had on their surroundings. For example, you can see a kind of geobiochemical fossil for old siderophile bacteria in deposits that take the form of old pyrite nodes in sediment.
The base of knowledge we acquire in the local system will translate to far future studies based in non-local systems. All the data that comes out of the Drake equation is gibberish, because the inputs are mostly garbage. It's just useful as a way of thinking about the scale of the problem across distance and time, and the remoteness of the present and near at hand.
As Jeff Goldbloom's character stated in Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way." This is supported by the abundance of life on Earth, even in what we consider to be harsh environments. Frankly, I think that the universe is teaming with life.
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New great filter added : finding life elsewere in one species's stellar system, bringing it home, invasive new species destroy biome, endgame.
That would mean everybody did it and if the great filter is dependent on other life the numbers don't add up
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He'd still be able to whip, but would no longer able to nay-nay
/s
It depends on some important details. For example, if it turns out this life is actually related to earth life (ie, shares a common, very distant ancestor), then it doesn't increase our knowledge of how likely life is to develop from nothing, as the number of life origins remains at 1. However, it does mean that if we find life on one body in a system, it is likely to spread to other bodies nearby (though whether or not it ends up surviving is another matter entirely).
If we find that life on Venus is an independent origin (well, if it IS life and not just an unexpected/unidentified abiotic process), then that means life is likely to be very common, but the question of complex multicellular life arising is a far different matter. We should then start to focus on researching exactly what conditions are needed for such life, restricting ourselves to searching for such environments while still researching the simple life forms we find in case they give us unexpected answers.
Multicellular life has evolved independently at least 25 times that we know of on Earth. The general consensus is that multicellular life is not one of the great filters.
I think you misunderstood me. Regardless of how many times multicellularity evolved on EARTH, that doesn't tell us how common we can expect complex multicellular life to be in the universe as a whole, as we only know of one place where it has occurred. The frequency of multicellular evolution may tell us that if conditions are right it is likely to occur, but we still need to figure out what those conditions/limits are.
I think he was probably referring to the development of eukaryotic cells, which is necessary for complex multicellular life, and as far as we know has only occurred once.
what do you mean by evolving independently 25 times? and how do we know this? (not challenging your comment, just genuinely curious!)
I’m not an evolutionary biologist but I know that this is what research suggests. Here’s a paper: http://www-eve.ucdavis.edu/grosberg/Grosberg%20pdf%20papers/2007%20Grosberg%20%26%20Strathmann.AREES.pdf
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That's literally what I was referring to when I talked about Venus and earth life sharing a common ancestor...
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Sure but your implications are too narrow. Panspermia could be common too. We don’t know.
Except I pointed out panspermia already. Again. You are missing the point.