There is another option here, where organic precursors accumulate via some currently unexplored process.
Really any system capable of creating themrodynamic disequilibrium and a chemical gradient could be an option. An example of this might be the freeze and thaw cycle of large planetoids. Swing close to the planet, warm up enough, move away, cool enough. Just a basic cycle (I believe the surface images of Pluto support the existence of such cycles). If volatile ices can have just enough warth to create bonds, there are many many many more of these types of objects than well places 'goldilocks' planets. Give it enough time and one will knock out of orbit and smash into a planet that does have adequate conditions for the development of life. Just a bunch of precursor chemistry to life, but plenty of it.
I've tried to look into deep space volatile ice chemistry but haven't exactly found great resources. But it strikes me that if a simple extraplanetary mechanism for pre-life chemistry accumulation exists, well, then life is probably pretty much everywhere.
Not quite the same thing. Actual abundant phosphorus compounds would be quite surprising. Probably the end of the phosphorus-problem resolution of the fermi paradox, for one thing. But medium-small organic molecules aren't that big a surprise anymore.
I know its just a typo and an easy one to make at that, regardless themrodynamic is my new favorite word! I’m chomping at the bit to use it in conversation along with telepathetic.
As long as we're talking about typos, you might be interested to know that it's really "champing at the bit," although chomping is commonly used as well. (Unless you were just having a bit of fun there, in which case, never mind.)
I think less interesting than life originating elsewhere is that this line of reasoning means earth is seeding life throughout the galaxy in real time. It’s fully possible that we are the first life in the universe, after all the first life would look up and wonder why the universe seemed unpopulated. Well - assuming all this adds up to life populated planets being able to seed other life potentially populated planets, we may be the first and only life in the galaxy, but we won’t likely be the last. We’ve been spewing life filled ice and dust into space for quite some time.
Barring absurd circumstances, so would the 2nd through the 10th life in the universe think this. After all, for them, there's barely any more existing life than for the 1st.
And, if instead we narrow it such that "the first life would think this for the first 100 years of its awareness that there might be more life out there"...
Then it also becomes true for the 11th through the 100,000th life born, because the first 100 years is also the almost certainly a low level of technology and of just not having spent enough time looking.
Thus, the fact that we say "it looks empty" does not do us any good in determining whether we are #1 or #100,000, or even higher still.
It sucks that we will be extinct soon, and didn't get to figure out which number (roughly) we are.
Why would we go extinct?
We will transform earth to our needs and when the time is right we expand to space. Maybe not with our current biological body, but something different.
> Why would we go extinct? We will transform earth to our needs and when the time is right we expand to space.
At present, we are transforming Earth to our short term needs, but against our long term needs. The timescales don't match, because expanding to space should take several centuries, but we are risking wrecking the planet after only two centuries of industrial civilization, roughly. So it's wise to be afraid of extinction.
This is just not true. We are changing the earth in ways that is killing existing life but we are not threatening the existence of life or humanity as a whole. No matter what happens humans will adapt and life will evolve to fill new niches.
I can't see how you're so confident. As we continue to haphazardly destabilizing the climate and the environment there could be catastrophic tipping points that we're currently unaware of.
That's such a callous and ghoulish attitude to me. Human consciousness and civilization are nature's greatest achievement. We should not let it be extinguished. Nature will not be able to recreate it, at least not on this planet.
I’m not saying it’s good or bad, I’m saying life will survive us.
I’m not particularly eager to see humanity extinguished or the world reset into another age. But if it happens, life won’t be gone from the universe even if there’s only life here on earth.
Nature might, who knows? And maybe we are just “programmed” to feel our own importance, and thats perhaps necessary but not sufficient to save us.
We probably won’t go extinct. But the population will probably strongly plummet and we may lose the ability to go to space. If someone told me we would be back to subsistence level existence in 100 years, I would not be surprised.
Arguably we currently don't have the ability to go "to space" for any meaningful definition of "space". We barely set foot on Luna a couple of times and since then only went a couple hundred kilometers up. We haven't even reached another planet, we have one (or is it two?) probes barely in interstellar space, no ambition to reach another star at all.
Yes, my point isn’t as much the position of ordering for life, but that we are seeding the galaxy already to spread life in the mechanism being discussed. I think that’s more interesting frankly than the possibility our life was seeded. We know the former is actually happening for a fact. The latter is a possibility.
I think that Mars is overrated. It is smaller than Earth, and way more difficult to live there, so we would get like 30% extra space for 1000 times the cost per square meter.
And then what? We do not have a third planet like that nearby. Mercury and Venus are too hot. Jupiter and Saturn are gas with no solid surface. Uranus and Neptune are ice. The next solar system is way too far.
I suspect that if we ever get the ability to travel to the next solar system, it will probably be easier to just stay in space, and only use the planets to mine the resources. Even for that, asteroids may be more convenient.
So, from this perspective, Earth is, and will remain, unique.
Putting a colony on Mars won’t save us from our rather unredeemable quality of being human. If we ruined one planet, we can ruin two.
Realistically, terraforming mars for sustained independent settlements is likely not within our technological horizon before we wipe ourselves off this planet.
Life will survive us. I think we think too highly of ourselves.
I don’t think we will end human civilization either though. The fact we could inhabit the moon and eventually mars at all means we could adapt to a inhospitable earth pretty easily. Maybe there will be much fewer of us and we wouldn’t like that life, but our future descendants would know nothing different and would be adapted to that civilization. But in the time spans of geology life will be resilient to whatever we do.
>The fact we could inhabit the moon and eventually mars at all means we could adapt to a inhospitable earth pretty easily.
Hmm, not so fast. I don't think we've proved that at all.
We can "inhabit" those in the same way that I can "inhabit" the bottom of a pool.
In fact, as a numbers game: we've been on the moon during all the Apollo missions for ~3.5 days. Modern humanoids are about 200,000 years old. Or in other words, we've inhabited the moon for 5e-8 % of humanities' existence.
The record for holding one's breath is ~25 minutes by a guy called Budimir Šobat. Say their lifespan is 85 years. That's about 5e-7 % of their life. Or in other words, they've "inhabited" the bottom of the pool for 10x longer than humanity as a species has "inhabited" the moon.
I wouldn't feel comfortable saying his record proves we can inhabit the bottom of a pool, and I think the same has to be applied to the moon.
We have to consider self-sufficiency as a condition of whether or not we're really considered as native inhabitants of a place, or just a temporary extension of the mother planet.
In that regard, we honestly can't even really prove equilibrium with our home planet's resources, let alone an inhospitable one like mars or the moon.
I'm sure we could sustain a colony of 50 people on mars for the rest of their natural lives. Pack them enough air and snacks, and I'm sure it's doable today. However, I'm much more skeptical that we could do that without constant resupply for an indefinite period. Yeah, we might be able to conceivably generate electricity, purify water, oxygen, grow food, etc on-site, but what happens when those solar panels start to fail at 50 years, or the mechanical interlocks on the airlocks start to become excessively leaky, or the HVAC systems fail? None of that equipment can be regenerated on mars.
right these are the extremes. But my point is life on earth no matter how inhospitable we make the planet would be strictly easier than on the moon, or mars. I don’t think we will go extinct, but we may become greatly diminished.
> Microscopic ice crystals and dust, for example, containing bacteria and spores capable of withstanding the conditions in space, can spread into space from areas of a planet’s upper atmosphere.
I've given this some thought before. I like the idea of mushrooms being all around the cosmos due to their adaptability and the resistance of spores.
Also, the universe might actually belong to viruses.
Watch this space for news on my hip new Colorado startup which fires psilocybe spores into space in the hopes of freaking the aliens right the fuck out. Monetization strategies are still unclear but I think we've got something here.
Monetization will figure itself out. What’s important is growing your user base, then you can look at a small fee of $5 a month (more for enterprise options)
What’s exciting is the market is potentially very large, and hitherto uncontacted
I think most fungi can feed on a sugar solution. Sugar molecules can arise on a planet with no life, just by regular chemical reactions. So there could be a planet out there growing earth mushrooms.
Fred Hoyle did a lot of thinking about this, about the nature of anti-entropic processes and the emergence of lipids, because thats when you can build a wall from the surrounding water and really get down to business.
His early "how about comets" work got laughed out of town. I think the laughter might be more hollow now, but there was a long winter for Hoyle in the Astronomy community, he was a little to "out there" for some people. I don't know for sure but I'm thinking he may have been very irritating to work with as well, not a lot of love around the FRS table.
Somebody else before him, Leo Szilard, observed that most biological processes appear to contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics because they take/collect/leverage disparate energy and concentrate it locally in another form.
It was Schrödinger who most famously claimed that life decreases entropy and he immediately got a lot of crap for it and apologised. Biological processes increase entropy, but decrease the Gibb’s free energy. That’s usually the confusion
It would be nice to somehow constrain these possibilities. Mesh the various generations of stellar populations with the time for interstellar travel under various scenarios, with the time it has taken for the sequences of more complex living structures to evolve etc.
Are there any catalysts that are much faster diffusing than being reinvented locally?
Maybe there is a paper about that already or we dont know enough to derive something useful from such constraints.
The concept of carbon life as a universal and migratory phenomenon is certainly appealing. The question is whether the few pieces of the puzzle we have already sketch anything concrete about the many missing pieces.
What if you could seed probes, like the Breakthrough Starshot probes, with synthetic life that, upon reaching their destination, would develop into humanoids that would explore for you and send back data?
That's a lot of ifs, but it would be an interesting way of exploring interstellar space in a much shorter time span.
It may not need to migrate. At some point between the Big Bang and now, the entire universe was habitable. Temperatures between 0C and 100C would have been the norm for some period, and the universe would have been much smaller than today. If RNA originated during that period, life may just be almost everywhere.
At that time in the early universe, there were no carbon, oxygen, or nitrogen atoms, and no planets with water. Life could only get started several million years after the first supernovas made heavy atoms.
How so? The 0°-100° era was between 10 and 17 million years after the Big Bang. There were no stars or planets during this period. There were no primordial elements heavier than lithium. Heavier elements were not created until several hundred million years later, after the first supernovas. "At some point around 200 to 500 million years, the earliest generations of stars and galaxies form" -- Before that, there were no oxygen atoms. The guy who wrote that arxiv paper did not know that there were no heavy elements. Please explain what process you think created oxygen atoms before 10My.
"The guy" is a well known astrophysicist (astrophysicists frequently refer to anything othe than Hydrogen and Helium as "metals").
his article starts out saying early supernovas (very, very early) would be required and the stars would need to be enormous. He cites various estimates of the early universe to support this.
When this universe ends and a new one begins, we may be able to leave messages to the next universes through gravitational waves. This could allow a way for our minds to be decoded and recompiled in a new universe in some structure at least capable of knowing joy.
It’s a poetic way of viewing the possibility of life spreading throughout the cosmos: tiny cellular “ Noah’s arks” journeying across the vast oceans of space, potentially bringing life to new worlds.
When did I say inanimate objects aren't structured matter?
Actually I'm saying that life is like inanimate matter, but is just another step on a continuum towards greater structure.
The first "life" couldn't even affect a thing next to it. Now humans are changing Earth and the near solar system. In the future our reach will be galaxy wide and beyond. Increasing order from disorder.
That's right- many people (myself included) believe that the subjective experience of consciousness is merely an emergent property of big brains (an epiphenomenon). And even if that does imply the universe is "meaningless", those big brains contain enough space for us to make our own meaning. I'm a nihilist in the universal sense, but a humanist in person.
So things like AI can't be conscious, this is some sort of biological process?
What is so specific about "biological" (which is a fairly meaningless term) that can't be replicated if we do the same thing with silicon or other substrates?
I think you are hand waving the whole thing and thinking consciousness = brains.
Sure, our brains produce consciousness, but WHY? Structure? Density of information? Complexity? Brain waves?
I didn't brains were the only way to achieve consciousness, nor did I imply that.
I believe it is entirely possible that we could eventually create AI that is conscious, or at least, would be able to convince it is. Whether this is achievable is different from whether it is possible, but I do think that if we continue down the current line with LLMs and other models, we'll eventually end up with a system that can articulate its consciousness to the point where the Supreme Court will have to make a decision about AI rights.
Like you basically said, consciousness is just an awareness of self. Awareness of self comes as part of an evolutionary adaptation to survive and propagate.
Consciousness does not necessarily mean you are non-deterministic in your consciousness operating.
Everything may be deterministic, but too complex for us to figure out at this point.
Such a weird “belief” to hold, although admittedly I held it until my late twenties. The one objective fact of the universe is it exists and it existing at all is freaking weird. What is the uncaused cause and why are we here to experience it? Saying it’s an accident holds zero logical weight and human logic being “made up” isnt an argument but further proof of this. The truth is your nihilist belief has been taken down by so many philosophers and thinkers across so many different cultures it seems criminal none of these arguments in favor of meaning are taught in schools. Then we wonder why everyone’s so depressed.
Doubtful given the laws of thermodynamics and the rate at which the universe is expanding. Heat death seems to be an inevitable conclusion at some point.
We’ve not established the rate of expansion, if it’s accelerating, what rate it’s accelerating, or even if space is expanding. It seems likely but not proven or nailed down. Further, it’s not known if it’s possible to manipulate the expansion, such that you could create a local pocket of non expanding space. At the moment galactic space is likely not expanding, and space around black holes wouldn’t expand for an extraordinarily long time.
It does seem inevitable, but it also seems that way from our current point of knowledge. Nothing says the story ends with our current understanding.
For all we know every 15 billion years a universe worth of matter springs into existences blowing the existing matter outside of our visible universe. This is a contrived point but we don’t know what the universe looks like at really large timescales beyond our visible universes birth. It could (and likely does) get weird.
Both of these things are simply observations from a limited perspective. If the universe just dies doesn’t it seem weird for it to have ever existed in the first place? Surely this one thing that is all that ever could and does exist didnt just happen to start existing 13 billion years ago and we’re just lucky enough to be around to experience the short existence of all there ever is and could be.
The article discusses seeding life at a galactic scale, which is beyond our sun. At some point you’re talking about intergalactic space. Further, the expansion of space and the necessity of a universal heat death is a theory, and is in no way proven.
Unless laws of Physics can be broken it is not possible to migrate anything through the universe. Currently galaxies are moving away from each other at the speed of ~light. You can't just reach anywhere.
It might not have the consciousness of your loved one, but the whole process from “death” to complete decomposition, is part of life and done by living things (animals, bacteria, plants, funghi, other microorganisms)
Would you say your arm is alive? Is your foot alive? Your nails? And if they are not, then are you alive?
You can’t just put together a bunch of dead things and call it life. Just like splitting loving things won’t make them dead (even if it ends our perception of that thing’s consciousness)
Everything is completely intertwined with its environment
How is that not just equivocation on the meaning of the term ‘life’ though?
Isn’t that like saying nothing is ‘cold’ because coldness doesn’t really exist, its just a lack of heat?
When I say “this toaster is not alive” you know exactly what I mean. When I say “this corpse is dead” you know exactly what I mean. Why play word games about it?
I mean, you can say that about anything. Hegel took this to the extreme and said that reality itself cannot even be said to exist unless you use words to describe it, that before humans named water there was no water. However it’s not very useful to say, since by definition the undetermined unity contains nothing of interest unless it is split up into determinations
You can’t have a conscious experience of the undetermined unity because it isn’t a thing. It contains nothing of interest because it’s totally indeterminate. It literally doesn’t exist, it’s like pure death. It’s just the starting point before consciousness and thought. The absolute is the state of maximum development away from this original undetermined point. Attempting to return to it is to try and reverse time
Really any system capable of creating themrodynamic disequilibrium and a chemical gradient could be an option. An example of this might be the freeze and thaw cycle of large planetoids. Swing close to the planet, warm up enough, move away, cool enough. Just a basic cycle (I believe the surface images of Pluto support the existence of such cycles). If volatile ices can have just enough warth to create bonds, there are many many many more of these types of objects than well places 'goldilocks' planets. Give it enough time and one will knock out of orbit and smash into a planet that does have adequate conditions for the development of life. Just a bunch of precursor chemistry to life, but plenty of it.
I've tried to look into deep space volatile ice chemistry but haven't exactly found great resources. But it strikes me that if a simple extraplanetary mechanism for pre-life chemistry accumulation exists, well, then life is probably pretty much everywhere.