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dreamkeeper@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

This is the main reason I’ve never taken the Fermi paradox seriously. I know it’s only supposed to be a thought experiment, but way too many casual readers interpret it as some kind of scientific theory.

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ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Additionally, imagine if it’s true that the universe is actually infinite. There’s no real reason to believe it’s not, and if it is, that means we cannot possibly predict some things about it. Such as the chances of us living in a densely populated region versus being literally a trillion light-years from the nearest occupied planet. Large-scale patterns of distribution of just about anything could look like anything imaginable over any given area, and there may never be a scale in which homogeneity becomes stable and perpetual.

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tomiant@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I always found it arrogant to presume aliens wanted anything to do with us. If life exists one other planet, then life will exist fucking everywhere and we wouldn’t be special.

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- dreamkeeper@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  If the rare earth hypothesis is true, which I personally think it is because of how many coincidences it took to make Earth habitable, then I do think they would be interested.
  
  I mean we’d be very interested if we found another Earth-like planet with a civilization on it, so why wouldn’t aliens? Presumably any species capable of that discovery would at least have a need to pursue new knowledge, otherwise they would not be able to advance scientifically.
  
  It’s not about humans being special at all, rather the opposite. Intelligent life is likely to share at least some things in common with us. For example it’s possible that they’re also violent assholes like we are, and destroyed their own planet, so now they a need one and we fit the bill.
  
  If the rare earth hypothesis is false, then things simultaneously become more and less interesting. More interesting in that there’s suddenly a whole galaxy of life-rich planets to explore, less interesting in that there would be nothing rare about an Earth-like planet and aliens may be less interested in us.
  
  But even then, I feel that someone’s going to be interested. We have millions of species on this planet and that doesn’t stop people from looking for new species.
  
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  - tomiant@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I’m being semi-facetious of course, I just always found it a bit funny to assume that life either only exists on Earth or on Earth and then like a few other planets. Presumably if life exists anywhere beyond Earth it would be safe to assume that life would be everywhere and not uncommon at all, for reasons of panspermia and because it would indicate life is an inevitable chemical process that would naturally spring up around the Universe.
    
    I’d say that the two extremes- life being unique to Earth, and life being ubiquitous in the Universe, are both more reasonable positions than life being unique only to Earth bar a few other places.
    
    I am a strong proponent of life being ubiquitous, because the Universe doesn’t do “one off”, and as per my previous argument, if it’s here, it’s everywhere. That’s only my intuition, of course, we can’t meaningfully say scientifically which is the case without more data either way.
    
    But to address the original argument- if we would say that life is indeed everywhere, then that would seriously diminish the interest of any would-be advanced alien civilization because they’d likely have seen it before. Interesting, sure, but not world-shattering, just like finding a new species of orchid deep in an Amazonian jungle would be interesting to botanists and maybe be photographed but not even make the faintest blip on the radar of the corpus of scientific discovery as a whole.
    
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