Re: A Sample of...One
The singular or what appears to be singular happening of Abiogenesis does suggest that it’s rare in so much that it needs certain conditions and those conditions are clearly not the same as needed for oxygen breathing multicellular life. So along the way either because of life or through some other means we’ve moved out of abiogenesis conditions and while life thrives, abiogenesis is kaput. From my understanding as seen in some lab created ‘artificial life’, the base pairs of DNA don’t have to be GATC, other similar molecules will work just as well, so the universal code of DNA in earth life is one hint that if other abiogenesis events happened, only one made the leap.
It’s possible that out there are millions of planets with self assembling molecules assembling and then slowly falling apart only to assemble again in a constant cycle, needing some sort of push at the right time to get out of the rut.
If we look at cellular based life and intelligence, life or smarts that are built from smaller blocks that generally obey the whole, then an ant colony or similar hive is quite possibly what’s required for planet wide intelligence where the cell is at least one more stage advanced than in a human.
It’s possible individual human ‘cells’ are just too independent to form a society that can stretch the stars. Just look at us now, not only does ‘I got mine, fuck you’ seem to be the antithesis of society, but when the masses are asked, we also seem to put those types of people in power and control of society. A planet wide intelligence acting towards a singular goal may be needed to not have some random person fuck it all up. It’s like in Contact where they send us instructions to build a wormhole device and the fanatics blow it up, only in the real world the fanatic accidentally destabilizes the anti-matter tanks near the whitehole core and pop there goes the planet!
Hyper intelligent hives would probably look at Humans as a singular creature and wonder why we are giving the cancerous elements a say and we would reply, “no those are some of our most famous people!” Then someone would show them the horrible multi-tentacled monster that is anyone of the Kardashians and their small to medium sized town’s worth of people manipulating things behind the scenes to give the appearance of a singular being, and to the horror of nerds everywhere go “finally someone intelligent to talk to!”
——-
Now intergalactic is a trickier story, some of them are only ghosts that we can never actually reach. Which is something not really talked about in this whole equation (to be fair to Drake, I don’t think it was known at the time) that expansion appears to be driving galaxies away from us and it’s getting faster. While galactic clusters should stay around each other for quite some time, expansion doesn’t just put a limit on how far we can travel but also a limit on how old relative to the universe a civilization needs to be to have a chance of reaching beyond their local group out of shear physics. Physics in general seem to give a very much “you can look but don’t touch!” Type of universe. As galaxies move across our universe horizon and get pulled/pushed away from us faster than the speed of light, it becomes a real life zenos paradox to ever physically get to them no matter how old our civilization is.
|