←back to thread

First images from Euclid are in

(dlmultimedia.esa.int)
1413 points mooreds | 2 comments | 21 Oct 24 20:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.423s | source
Show context
bikamonki ◴[21 Oct 24 23:55 UTC] No.41909790[source]▶
So many solar systems out there, life evolved in many planets for sure. No proof but no doubt.
replies(8): >>41909912 #>>41909966 #>>41910089 #>>41910409 #>>41911453 #>>41911920 #>>41913384 #>>41923594 #
ekianjo ◴[22 Oct 24 00:25 UTC] No.41909966[source]▶
Life? Probably. Something that has thinking capabilities? Much more doubtful.
replies(8): >>41909978 #>>41910006 #>>41910113 #>>41910249 #>>41910306 #>>41910347 #>>41910496 #>>41910637 #
m3kw9 ◴[22 Oct 24 00:28 UTC] No.41909978[source]▶
One proof is that we are thinking, and so are dogs, cats and monkeys to a lesser extent.
replies(2): >>41909988 #>>41910686 #
ekianjo ◴[22 Oct 24 00:29 UTC] No.41909988[source]▶
That's Earth. There is no model to say that life always goes on that way. We just have no clue.
replies(5): >>41910018 #>>41910032 #>>41910114 #>>41910698 #>>41910817 #
virtue3 ◴[22 Oct 24 00:34 UTC] No.41910018[source]▶
"Astronomer Frank Drake created a formula to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way. Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan modified the equation to calculate the odds that Earth was the first intelligent life in the universe. They concluded that the odds of Earth being the first are less than one in 10 billion trillion, which suggests that other intelligent species have likely evolved."

1 in 10 billion trillion is some pretty serious odds.

It does get more complicated if we factor in life happening quickly enough without an extinction event.

But after looking at images like this there is just NO WAY we are the only ones.

replies(3): >>41910104 #>>41910372 #>>41911395 #
bigiain ◴[22 Oct 24 01:46 UTC] No.41910372[source]▶
That 600 times zoom-in on 1% of the eventual survey of 1/3rd of the non milky way sky... Shows a couple of galaxies, which if the milky way is "typical" represent a couple of billion stars.

Suddenly 1 in 10 billion trillion odds doesn't seem so (and I apologise in advance for this) astronomical...

replies(1): >>41910656 #
jiggawatts ◴[22 Oct 24 02:34 UTC] No.41910656[source]▶
Typical galaxies the size of the Milky Way have 100 to 2,000 billion stars and could have as many as ten trillion planets.

That’s about 100^5, so one way to think of this is that if you categories these by any four properties (temperature, stability, hydration, day length) then you’d expect about 100 samples for any point in that 4D space.

So even if you believe Earth is unique along four critical metrics, there are about a hundred planets per galaxy that also have those attributes within a percentage point. If you allow some wiggle room then you have tens of thousands or even millions.

We know conditions here on Earth varied significantly more than 1% over billions of years and life survived and even thrived.

replies(1): >>41911415 #
DubiousPusher ◴[22 Oct 24 05:19 UTC] No.41911415[source]▶
But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a severe limit upon their complexity.
replies(1): >>41918418 #
jiggawatts ◴[22 Oct 24 20:32 UTC] No.41918418[source]▶
Then use that as one of the four critical parameters.

E.g.: You might believe that some variability in conditions (hot-house Earth, iceball Earth) is required to "kick start" evolution. Okay, then simply pick out the subset of the parameter space with that amount of variability.

replies(1): >>41920166 #
1. DubiousPusher ◴[23 Oct 24 00:19 UTC] No.41920166[source]▶
But we literally don't know the variability. Unlike the numbers of stars in the universe or the number of planets, which we have some statistically board observational evidence for, we have no such statistical evidence for the development of high energy microbiology. We have 1/1 examples. And we don't know if that's because it was inevitable and the eukaryotes have just outcompeted everything else or if it was exceedingly rare. It could be a coefficient of effectively 0 on the whole the thing.
replies(1): >>41921185 #
2. lazide ◴[23 Oct 24 02:33 UTC] No.41921185[source]▶
Yup. We just don’t know what we don’t know, as far as odds go.

What we do know that we don’t know, is already a massive amount - enough to not have any actual confidence in any guesses we could make.

Hell, Europa could have life in it, and we currently couldn’t tell. Venus too. Maybe Mars. Maybe IO.