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“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

(www.skyatnightmagazine.com)
417 points fuidani | 2 comments | 17 Apr 25 08:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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seanhunter ◴[17 Apr 25 08:59 UTC] No.43714467[source]▶
Firstly that is completely badass science. The idea that you can use observations to detect the chemical composition of an exoplanet millions of kilometres away is an absolute triumph of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Really amazing and deeply humbling to me.

Secondly, my prior was always that life existed outside of earth. It just seems so unlikely that we are somehow that special. If life developed here I always felt it overwhelmingly likely that it developed elsewhere too given how incredibly unfathomably vast the universe is.

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ta8645 ◴[17 Apr 25 09:20 UTC] No.43714565[source]▶
If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise too, will come before too long.

If, on the other hand, life is relatively rare, or we're the sole example, our future can't be statistically estimated that way.

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Andrew_nenakhov ◴[17 Apr 25 09:36 UTC] No.43714650[source]▶
It is quite plausible that life is abundant, but sentience is not. If we take Earth, it formed 4.5 billions years ago, conditions became suitable to support life like 4B years ago and first known signs of life are dated 3.7B years ago.

Now, in just .5B years Earth would likely become uninhabitable due to Sun becoming a red giant. In other words, on Earth life spent 90% of its total available time before sentience emerged. So on one side life is constrained simply by time, and on the other, sentience might not be necessary for organisms to thrive: crocodiles are doing just fine without one for hundreds of millions of years. To think of it, it is only needed for those who can't adapt to the environment without it, so humans really might be very special, indeed.

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ninjagoo ◴[17 Apr 25 11:25 UTC] No.43715257[source]▶
You may want to update your view that non-human animals lack sentience. [1]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4494450/

If you're referring to technology/civilization-building capabilities, that is a different matter.

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1. Andrew_nenakhov ◴[17 Apr 25 12:52 UTC] No.43716073[source]▶
I owned quite a number of pets in my life, so I don't need explaining that they do have some kind of relatively high-order intelligence that allows them to do quite a lot of things. Yet, this is clear that no kind of animal on Earth but us exhibits potential to have capabilities to spread themeselves beyond home planet once it becomes uninhabitable. Moreover, signs show that once a type of species finds their niche, their intelligence levels off and does not tend to increase. In other words, modern crocodiles are no smarter than crocs from 10 millions of years ago, because they are doing mostly fine as they are.
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2. griffzhowl ◴[17 Apr 25 13:14 UTC] No.43716344[source]▶
Yes, I think GP phrased it badly. This is just about the meaning of words: "sentience" just means sensory or experiential consciousness. It doesn't necessarily imply high intelligence or capacity for using technology