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

(www.skyatnightmagazine.com)
417 points fuidani | 1 comments | 17 Apr 25 08:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | 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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1. throw4847285 ◴[17 Apr 25 13:45 UTC] No.43716759[source]▶
This is where the discussion, as it always does, silently transitions from science into science fiction.

We know absolutely nothing about extraterrestrial life. We can only project our own singular experience onto the rest of the universe. We only have one data point. There is no scientifically acceptable method of induction from a single data point. The possibilities are endless, and are capacity to narrow them down becomes warped by our love of stories and the kinds of art that we have created about extraterrestial life, all of which are in one way or another metaphors for the human condition.

There is nothing wrong with saying, "Anything is possible and we have 0 evidence allowing us to narrow it down." It isn't fun, but it's true.