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View Poll Results: Are we alone in the Universe, based on the evidence at hand?
We are almost certainly alone. 1 5.88%
We are probably alone. 3 17.65%
We are probably not alone. 12 70.59%
We are definitely NOT alone. 2 11.76%
All the life is Planet X 3 17.65%
Multiple Choice Poll. Voters: 17. You may not vote on this poll

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  #1  
Old 06-18-2019, 12:53 AM
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Default A Sample of...One

I read Peter Ward's and Donald E. Brownlee's book, Rare Earth, about twenty years ago, after watching a documentary where Ward and Brownlee explained the Rare Earth Hypothesis, that "that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth (and, subsequently, human intelligence) required an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances."

Having been raised on sci-fi (and a scientific community) making the opposite assumption -- that the universe is teaming with life and civilizations in various stages of development -- consideration of this notion was as profound to me as the realization that there is (almost) certainly no afterlife or a universal entity. I'd like to imagine that there is life on Mars, and that someday we'll encounter Vulcans and Romulans, but if we don't destroy ourselves in the meanwhile the makeup of such a civilization is more likely to resemble Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire than Gene Roddenberry's Federation of Planets.

I was reminded of this after watching David Kipping's recent video (posted below), in turn based on "On the Rate of Abiogenesis from a Bayesian Informatics Perspective" an article he co-authored published last year in Astrobiology. That to answer the Drake Equation with any number higher than one, is an act of faith, with no real statistical or scientific basis in fact.
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Old 06-18-2019, 12:58 AM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

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Old 06-18-2019, 11:14 AM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

We're not alone but we might as well be: we can't even define life very well and we certainly can't define intelligence. All these assumptions we tend to make about prerequisites for life are unjustified: carbon-based, liquid water-based, even planet-based. And the assumptions we make about intelligence are unjustified: must arise from living things or be created by living things; probably motivated by reproduction; probably motivated to communicate.

The universe is probably full of things that have things in common with life as we know it, but (a) we will never discover the vast majority of them and (b) when we do, our definition of life will be challenged. And the universe is probably full of things that have things in common with intelligence as we think we define it, but we will never encounter most of them because they don't communicate or leave signs that we have any chance of recognising, and the ones we do encounter will challenge our definition of intelligence (just as each advance in AI does - "OK, that may be part of something intelligent beings can do but not the whole thing").

If we last long enough to get any actual observations, rather than just the current speculation, I predict the universe we know will end up being a (messy) continuum between lots of processes that definitely aren't life to things that most of us agree are alive, and a (messier) continuum between things that are completely dumb and entities that most of us agree have some fundamental qualities of intelligence.

And even if we survive as humans (possibly augmented and/or virtualised) for a million years and explore the whole galaxy, that's still a tiny tiny fraction of the universe - and what we experience will be a tiny fraction of what is going on in the galaxy under our noses.
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Old 06-18-2019, 04:43 PM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

What Jope said - particularly "We're [I would add probably] not alone but we might as well be." Regardless of how long we survive as a species, even in the best case, I don't think we primates will ever get a large enough sample to find and recognize other intelligences, no matter how powerful our thinking-machines get. Perhaps our thinking-machines and someone else's could eventually exchange information, but it would be over distances and time periods that might as well be meaningless to us.
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Old 06-18-2019, 06:14 PM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

IMO the drake equation hand waves away a number of serious issues.

One is the true vastness of the universe. Sure I’ve seen workings out of how probes could ‘visit’ every star in our galaxy in under a million years and since time is also vast it should have obviously happened at least once, but it still misses the vastness of space. Space is so vast that multiple space exploring probe networks could be roaming our galaxy right now and not know about each other, let alone know about us or be obvious enough we know about them. Space is so vast that when the andromeda galaxy and the milkyway collide it’s likely none of the stars in the arms collide and that only the most massive of the black holes in the cores will capture each other or have a good chance of hitting, because space is vast and mostly empty. Shows like Star Trek are great but have skewed our perception of space as smaller than it is, with stars just wizzing by even at low warp, though in reality a still photo is good enough to represent light speed travel to our nearest star for at least the first few months of the journey.

Which comes back to exploration and being stuck in a conserved universe. Due to the energy required to change speeds the probes will either move fast and zip on by, or slowly get up to speed then use energy carried with them to slow down again to the glacier pace needed to enter the planetary orbit of a star. I would prosume the best version is a combination of fast moving probes that send back signals to the slow probes to stop at stars of interest. In the end the exploring civilization gets a rolling snapshot of the galaxy with choice areas in enough detail to see life, but not some sort of omnipotent and always updated view. For any non-galactic-scale-god-like civilization it would take an active and on going interest over potentially millions of years to get a full detailed survey of everything in our galaxy in a manner that would then allow them to time signals or probes to thread the needles needed to make real first contact.

Another is the presumption there’s any use in space travel. Once a civilization has colonized a few planets and mined a bunch of asteroids providing ample resource breathing room what really is the use in exploring interstellar space? While there are probably plenty of good reasons, we are now down to guessing the psyche of space civilizations and I don’t even know where to start. The drake equation is fine for naturally driven probabilities like the chance of water or of self replicating chemicals, but when it comes to actual contact we are trying to quantify an alien intelligence’s interest in exploring vast empty and harsh spacetime in a way that either makes contact or spews enough waste that it’s obvious they’re there. How do we quantify the likelihood that an alien species won’t get bored of space exploration after the thrill of visiting other planets in their solar system has worn off?

Which leads to my opinion as a likely answer, that many alien civilizations eventually discover the ability to fabricate reality as they sense it and either through biomechanical interfaces or through just being an artificial intelligence created by or in mimic of their species, encountering strange looking life from odd lands, but all in a simulated environment.
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Old 06-18-2019, 06:22 PM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

I've always found the Rare Earth Hypothesis ... not entirely convincing.

First, as we now know, planets are actually quite common. As such, there should be lots of planets out there that happen to inhabit the "Goldilocks zones" around their respective stars.

Second, though there's a lot we don't know about how life arose on this planet, what we do know is that organic molecules form surprisingly rapidly and easily under conditions similar to those that prevailed early in the Earth's history. It doesn't seem unlikely that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, perhaps even millions of planets in our galaxy alone where life as we'd understand it arose.


But here's the rub: how likely is it that there's life out there that we could a.) recognize, and b.) communicate with? The answer is: not very likely at all.

After all, if we define "intelligent life" as life that produces signals or probes that we could detect, then "intelligent life" has arisen only once in the roughly 4 billion-year history of life on Earth. There is nothing to suggest that there's anything at all inevitable about the evolution of an "intelligent," technological species.

And even if hundreds -- heck, even thousands -- of such species have evolved in our galaxy, given the vast distances involved and the limitations imposed by the finite speed of light, the chances that any of them would happen to coexist and be close-enough for any sort of communication between them are virtually zero.


So, in short: Is Earth the only planet in the galaxy (much less the Universe) that supports life as we'd recognize it? Almost certainly not. Are we ever going to encounter and communicate with an alien civilization? Almost certainly not.


Such is my estimation, anyway. I'd love it if Star Trek turned out to be correct and the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life -- but that seems very unlikely, to put it mildly.


Peter Mulvey sums it up nicely:

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Old 06-18-2019, 06:46 PM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

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Old 06-18-2019, 07:42 PM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

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I've always found the Rare Earth Hypothesis ... not entirely convincing.

First, as we now know, planets are actually quite common. As such, there should be lots of planets out there that happen to inhabit the "Goldilocks zones" around their respective stars.

Second, though there's a lot we don't know about how life arose on this planet, what we do know is that organic molecules form surprisingly rapidly and easily under conditions similar to those that prevailed early in the Earth's history. It doesn't seem unlikely that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, perhaps even millions of planets in our galaxy alone where life as we'd understand it arose.

Another big discovery that changes the whole picture is that you don't have to be anywhere near a "habitable zone" to have things like massive, stable salt water oceans that may outlive their parent stars by billions of years.
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Old 06-18-2019, 08:39 PM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

I think there's "life" out there, in the sense of self-replicating information-carrying structures (like DNA or RNA but potentially different).

Of course, microbes are much more likely than macroorganisms (given Earth's history of life and their relative prevalence). And vegetative macroorganisms are probably much more likely than animal-like ones. And dumb alien animals are more likely than intelligent ones. And so on, with intelligent enough to communicate less likely, intelligent enough to develop complex technology, intra-solar-system space travel, interstellar travel, intergalactic travel, etc. etc.

For intelligent life also needs to have managed not to destroy itself, and given human history, it seems like developing a general intelligence can be such a strong adaptive advantage (the ability to outsmart disease, exploit non-obvious resources, develop weapons that aid in hunting and largely eliminate the threat of predators, etc.) that it leads to population growth that will consume the planet's resources and create conflict, etc. long before they develop the means for interstellar travel and colonization. The idea of Vulcans is nice, but given what we know about evolution, doesn't it seem only logical that the illogical and selfish Vulcan ancestors might've reproduced more? It could be that technological civilizations tend not to survive very long. It could be that there have been thousands or millions of advanced (i.e. to human level technology) civilizations in the universe... and also that >99% of them are long gone.

And given that a planet has life, it isn't guaranteed to be easily discoverable. Evolution is powerful but there are still areas of Earth that are devoid of life. It could be that it's on a planet with a frozen surface and the life is in the oceans beneath. Or it could be that the life is deep down where there is geothermal heat. It could be that life once covered the planet, but massive changes to the planet, climate changes or asteroid strikes or the like have killed most of it. Maybe eventually the remaining/existing life will adapt to colonize the rest of the planet, but that could be millions and millions of years from now.

It's also possible there could be lifeforms we wouldn't even recognize as life (at least, not for a long time) even if they fell into our laps.

But how likely is it to be near enough to us that we can discover it directly? Given how much effort it has been to explore our own backyard... While unlikely, it could be there are or were microbes on Mars but we haven't even explored the areas of Mars with significant amounts of water. But imagine that there are microbes on a planet in one of the 1,000 closest solar systems (all of which are light-years from ours!) - which would already be a pretty lucky occurrence. How long would it take us to explore those solar systems, to be able to travel to the planet, and to discover the existence of microbes on the surface? And then think of how much rarer life intelligent enough to have developed language and civilization would be.

I think the possibility of some sort of life, and even intelligent life, elsewhere in the universe is pretty high. Especially if we also allow that it could've existed in the past but be dead now. But the likelihood we'll ever encounter any of it, much less advanced spacefaring civilizations that we would want to meet (because given human history of uncontacted peoples, being contacted seems highly likely to be disastrous* even if the aliens don't just immediately declare war on us), seems extremely low to nonexistent.

*On the other hand, one could propose that species that behave in a warlike/oppressively colonial manner would be less likely to develop to the point of being able to visit Earth, since they may be more likely to destroy themselves through infighting and resource mismanagement. In other words, the Klingons would've been too busy nuking each other to get to the point where they could make contact with humans, while the Vulcans wouldn't. On the other other hand, it could also be that they would be a species that's developed a more eusocial way of being and their high-level of intraspecies peacefulness has little to no bearing on how they'd treat humans. And on the fourth hand, organisms vary! Even if the Vulcans as a whole were peaceful on planet Vulcan in the period immediately preceding their development of easy interstellar travel, there's no guarantee that Vulcan colonists would be so or remain so since the survival pressures would be very different and it would probably be a very non-representative sample of Vulcans who would choose to leave the homeworld.
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Old 06-19-2019, 10:07 AM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

There are thought to be a few peculiar things about Earth, and the solar system, that make the Earth likely to be unusual in the length of time it has sustained a liquid water environment:

1. Jupiter is thought to have entered into an unlikely resonance lock with Saturn early in the solar system's evolution, meaning that it migrated inwards close to Mars's current orbit and then back away again. This is thought to have prevented the inner planets growing as large as they typically do in other, so-far-discovered, planetary systems, and also diverted water-rich asteroid belt material inwards to bombard the inner planets. Without this process Earth would have much less water.

2. The moon is huge compared to the earth - no other satellite comes near. The best existing theory of its origin is an early collision between two planet-sized objects that knocked enough material into orbit that then coalesced into the moon. When random planetary collisions are modelled, such a collision that doesn't either shatter both planets into millions of small asteroids or result in a single large body is exceedingly unlikely.

The moon exerts a great stabilizing influence (preventing the earth's axis of spin wobbling around as much as it otherwise would) and so creates more stable seasons over geological time. It also raises sizeable regular tides in the oceans, which maybe are helpful to evolution?

If a planet needs to sustain a climate where liquid water exists continuously for many hundreds of millions, or even billions of years in order for intelligent life to evolve, then current theories suggest that such planets may be vanishingly rare.
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Old 06-19-2019, 11:13 AM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

But what's your vote? The outcome hinges on that conditional - if sustained liquid water is needed for intelligence to evolve.

It seems suspiciously easy to find reasons why the conditions that led to the one* observable instance of intelligent life that we recognise may be vanishingly rare. We don't have any real evidence that "intelligence" needs to resemble us.

* There might be others we've already observed, but we're not doing very well learning to communicate with octopuses or crows or chimpanzees (problem solving, tool using, complex communications).
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Old 06-19-2019, 11:20 AM
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Something that occurred to me yesterday ... maybe in the near future (years/decades) we'll have enough simulation power to create virtual universes and get "experimental" values for the variables in the Drake equation. And if (a big if) we manage not to embed our prejudices about what life and intelligence are, we might be able to assess the probability of self-protecting, self-reproducing, communicating things arising. (We haven't been very good at keeping prejudices out of AI systems so far.)

Given the vast distances and travel times to other stars compared to the human scale, maybe we'll create simulated intelligence before we discover it elsewhere...
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Old 06-19-2019, 12:44 PM
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I'm of the opinion that species capable of space travel that are only a few hundred years more advanced than ourselves are vanishingly rare - otherwise we would have seen the evidence by now. I think if we are still around in a few hundred years, we'll then have the capability to send out self-replicating probes which will then spread out and multiply exponentially to explore the galaxy over the next few tens/hundreds of millions of years.

A few hundred million years is nothing when compared to the age of the universe, so you'd expect that if other space-travelling species have existed, at least one of them would have evolved early enough that we should see their probes here by now.
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Old 06-20-2019, 01:20 AM
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I agree with JoeP and Sack and TLR

I think it is very likely that there is (some kind) of other life form out there somewhere, just based on the vast scale of the universe. And maybe there is even some form of microbial life in the solar system, which would be neat.

But I think it is unlikely to matter outside of thought experiments, for the simple reason that it is very unlikely we will ever encounter it. In part because of the vastness and the possibly insurmountable challenges of interstellar travel, in part because of the nebulous and anthropocentric thinking about the term "life," but mostly because we are not likely to survive long enough to encounter it. In terms of awareness of space and spacefaring, we are infants. We have only been dimly aware of our immediate cosmic surroundings for a few decades. Orbital travel is still an expensive and dangerous proposition.

Thus far, we have had only a very, very narrow window for comprehensible contact with intelligence, or a search for non-intelligent life. At the moment, we seem much more likely to destroy ourselves as a species in the near term than continue looking long enough to find some other life form, intelligent or not. So whatever the odds that we are objectively alone or not, I think the last humans will die without ever having found extraterrestrial life, which is pretty much the same as being alone.
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Old 06-20-2019, 07:36 AM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

And even if we suppose that there is intelligent life out there and humans may eventually contact it, we will probably all be long dead before it happens.

Unless we're in a Star Trek or Star Wars-like universe that is teeming with hundreds or thousands of interstellar spacefaring sentient species in our galaxy, but in that case, they're taking their damn time. Surely some empire should've come and colonized us by now.
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Old 06-20-2019, 10:42 AM
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A few hundred million years is nothing when compared to the age of the universe, so you'd expect that if other space-travelling species have existed, at least one of them would have evolved early enough that we should see their probes here by now.
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Surely some empire should've come and colonized us by now.
Yes but.

Speed of light; number of star systems in the galaxy (say 1 billion of the say 100 billion stars).

The galaxy could be riddled with intelligent space-faring civilisations right now, and even some which have 'survived' for the necessary millions of years (survived but changed by the experience, possibly evolved, they may not even all speak English any more).

But if you've colonised millions of planets across the galaxy, that's still about 0.1% of the available planets. How frequently are you going to check each candidate planet? Once your automated probes detect something, how long is it going to take the alert to get back to the nearest research facility / the Contact division? And how long will it take for the ambassadors / merchants / spies / warships to reach the candidate planet? Hundreds of years at least. Which is no time at all compared to the millions of years you've been managed your galactic empire, but a pretty long time for puny humans.

If there are enough planets giving rise to intelligent and communicating species, then we can expect a vastly greater number to sustain non-intelligent and non-communicating life forms or systems. Why would you bother to check every single one more often than every million years? I don't think the above kinds of arguments give proper considerations to the timescales involved.

In other words ... there might be a lot of civilisations out there of the kind we would try to contact ... but we are not remotely special or unique.
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Old 06-20-2019, 12:28 PM
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The galaxy could be riddled with intelligent space-faring civilisations right now, and even some which have 'survived' for the necessary millions of years (survived but changed by the experience, possibly evolved, they may not even all speak English any more).
buh how they gonna read their bible then huh?
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Old 06-20-2019, 03:55 PM
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The galaxy could be riddled with intelligent space-faring civilisations right now, and even some which have 'survived' for the necessary millions of years (survived but changed by the experience, possibly evolved, they may not even all speak English any more).
buh how they gonna read their bible then huh?
we goan hafta translate it! Missionaries! in! space!
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Old 06-21-2019, 12:37 AM
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Old 06-21-2019, 11:20 AM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

I am of the opinion that it's entirely possible that life could be rare, but the fact of the matter is that we simply don't have enough data to make any determination on how common intelligent (defined here as tool using and capable of developing advanced technology) life is. After all, we only have the sample size of one biosphere to evaluate the odds with.

It is very likely that the answer may never be discovered. It almost certainly won't be discovered in our lifetimes absent a ground breaking discovery of some nature. Personally, I hope that the universe is filled with countless interstellar civilizations and will be among them, but realistically calling that exceedingly unlikely is a monumental understatement.
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Old 06-21-2019, 05:23 PM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

“like star trek” I think a common sentiment and imo is skewing people’s views on the drake equation as in the back of their mind they really want FTL travel to exist and presume it does. I know I want it to exist. Unfortunately it really doesn’t look like any controllable traversable FTL travel exists. The two main theories I know of, warp (stretching and compressing space) and wormholes both require a type of anti-gravity matter to be found as well as manipulation of spinning blackhole or neutron star densities. Which is something many pop scientists hand wave away to keep hopes up, but if warp is possible, and I don’t think it is, but I want it to be, I expect it’s only available to galaxy sized civilizations to whom manipulating normal stars is old hat at this point. Without FTL it doesn’t just put a rather slow speed limit on everyone for star travel but get close to that limit and wacky relativistic effects occur. A trip to the Klingon home world and back looks a bit different when Kirk returns to find a completely different set of admirals in command.

I’ve always found it fascinating that in our universe you basically trade distance for time. A faster speed of light, with everything else being equal (and adjusted to not blow up) would make it much easier to travel to and see distant stars but we couldn’t see far back in time as easily.

On the other hand we might be lucky as the combination of the speed of light and universe expansion limits the reach and fuck up capabilities of any civilization. If while trying to make a wormhole we accidentally kick a fundamental constant into a lower ground state, like say the electric field suddenly stops being electric (I believe it’s one of the less talked about fields that’s the potential issue) and that kick produces a chain reaction blanking the electric field and making chemistry and molecular bonding suddenly stop, at the very least the speed of light limit leaves other civilizations millions of light years away blissfully unaware of our fuck up for those millions of years, maybe even being pulled beyond the expansion horizon being saved from our mistake.
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Old 06-21-2019, 08:05 PM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

Quote:
Originally Posted by MonCapitan2002 View Post
I am of the opinion that it's entirely possible that life could be rare, but the fact of the matter is that we simply don't have enough data to make any determination on how common intelligent (defined here as tool using and capable of developing advanced technology) life is. After all, we only have the sample size of one biosphere to evaluate the odds with.

It is very likely that the answer may never be discovered. It almost certainly won't be discovered in our lifetimes absent a ground breaking discovery of some nature. Personally, I hope that the universe is filled with countless interstellar civilizations and will be among them, but realistically calling that exceedingly unlikely is a monumental understatement.
This is the exact point of the OP -- at the present time we only have a sample of one -- one abiogenesis, which is the Earth. Until we have another data point to add to that we only speculating, not sciencing. If we at some point are able to create life in a laboratory, find life elsewhere in our solar system that is an indisputably independent abiogenesis (something I really hope will happen and that I agree is definitely possible) or SETI makes a groundbreaking discovery then -- two data points! And the argument for a universe where life is not rare has some legs.

I am not being a nattering nabob of negativity by holding a skepticism of a life-filled universe. I agree that the numbers of potentially habitable worlds just in our own galaxy is astronomical. And the video in the OP uses the word "if" quite a number of times, which is something I always look for in any argument.

But there's a lot of "ifs" on both sides. And there is only one side that has an irrefutable fact -- we only have a sample of one abiogenesis. Which for now makes the Rare Earth hypothesis the only argument that is backed by any evidence. And just because life did start early here on the earth unfortunately doesn't prove anything, again because this is a sample of one. The thought experiment in the video starting at 10:11 makes this point very succinctly.

On a personal note - in the same way my realization there is no evidence whatsoever for an afterlife made all human lives so much more valuable to me personally, the idea that this might be it life-wise in the universe has only increased my reverence for all life on this planet. Partly because everything that dies is NOT going to some boring eternal heaven place or even coming back here to suffer in some other form, but also because if the Rare Earth hypothesis is correct (and until we have data point #2 there is no scientific basis for arguing otherwise), I feel we have an obligation to the Universe, as the only known sentient beings, to stop treating our biosphere as a playground, a landfill and sewer and get our :censored: act together. And extra thanks to TLR for posting the Peter Mulvey vid. If life turns out not to be rare, that perspective goes a long way in answering the Fermi Paradox.
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Old 06-22-2019, 01:08 AM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

I’ve been kinda ignoring it my posts but I should add that I don’t discount a rare earth as a possibility at all, it certainly is. There are plenty of jumps that happen to get all the way to a multi cellular being with a nervous system and any one of them could be extremely rare. Even on our own planet life seemed fine with being simple single cell packets of replicating molecules for a very long time even when compared to the age of our planet.
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Old 06-22-2019, 03:31 AM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kyuss Apollo View Post
I feel we have an obligation to the Universe, as the only known sentient beings, to stop treating our biosphere as a playground, a landfill and sewer and get our :censored: act together.
That's my attitude in a nutshell. We've got one habitable planet, with one viable biosphere. There is nowhere else we can go, and the probability that benevolent aliens will show up and save us from ourselves is for all intents and purposes zero. [People who think that we can just terraform Mars and go live there need to learn some basic Physics and Biology.] If we continue down the road we're going, the result will be a tragedy on a galactic, if not universal scale.


At times, I think: "If, in our arrogance and stupidity, we wind up destroying ourselves -- then, so what? It's not as if we didn't have plenty of warning. If we wind up destroying ourselves, it's entirely our own fault."

"What really bothers me is that we're rapidly driving so many other species to extinction. Our descendants -- if we have any -- won't forgive us for that."
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Old 06-24-2019, 09:10 PM
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Default Re: A Sample of...One

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kyuss Apollo View Post
But there's a lot of "ifs" on both sides. And there is only one side that has an irrefutable fact -- we only have a sample of one abiogenesis. Which for now makes the Rare Earth hypothesis the only argument that is backed by any evidence.

I don't think that makes any sense. That there isn't a reliable estimate how common life is isn't evidence for anything, least of all that life is rare.
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