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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: 0.225s | 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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energy123 ◴[17 Apr 25 10:50 UTC] No.43715071[source]▶
This is now much less plausible. Intelligence, like eyesight, is believed to be a result of convergent evolution[0].

[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence-evolved-at-least...

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lupusreal ◴[17 Apr 25 10:58 UTC] No.43715113[source]▶
Being intelligent doesn't necessarily lead to runaway technological development. Dolphins are smart but they're never going to invent radios to broadcast their existence to other star systems. They're stuck in the water and don't have thumbs. And even orangutans, who have thumbs and live on land, don't seem tracked for technology even if humans weren't around; their ecological niche is small even if we assumed humans weren't wrecking their environment, and they seem comfortable and steady in it.
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diggan ◴[17 Apr 25 13:39 UTC] No.43716661[source]▶
> Dolphins are smart but they're never going to invent radios to broadcast their existence to other star systems.

How could we possibly know this? The only case of "Dolphins" we know of, is on Earth, with the interference of humanity, and we're looking at Dolphins at a really small timescale.

Given N thousands of years without interference from other species, who can really confidently tell exactly how Dolphins would evolve?

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lupusreal ◴[17 Apr 25 13:40 UTC] No.43716691[source]▶
We've had at least two developments of ""dolphins"" that I know of. We also have other intelligent sea life, like squids and octopuses, who've been around for a hell of a long time and are on track to never develop advanced tool creation and use. Living in the water is a massive tech nerf.
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diggan ◴[17 Apr 25 13:45 UTC] No.43716757[source]▶
> Living in the water is a massive tech nerf.

Says land-living animal :)

Again, are you saying that you confidently can predict a hypothetical future where Dolphins, even given millions of years, would never invent the radio? I think it's unlikely too, but so are humans, so who knows what could happen.

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1. lupusreal ◴[17 Apr 25 16:18 UTC] No.43718971[source]▶
Besides the whole fire thing, which is a serious problem for the metallurgy necessary to make radio, to have any chance of it they'd need to get fingers instead of the optimal swimming flippers they have now. They'll never do that as long as they're aquatic. If millions of years of evolution has them climb out of the water and become land animals again then there might be a glimmer of hope for them, but then they'd no longer be recognizable as dolphins. As it stands now, field mice have a more direct path towards becoming radio makers than dolphins do.