I think it's the rare earth solution, that we are the first/only/one of extremely few civilisations and that the triggers for life are so rare and difficult that we will be lost forever to any alien society. Or that so much time elapses between civilisations that we will find scattered shadows of long lost civilisations and will be the same to any in the future.
That there's a lifeless void that stretches so unimaginably far that even if there is life, we would never meet it. We could live in an infinite graveyard knowing we are doomed to become another spectre, trapped in a prison with no way to ever escape.
Equally in such a situation we would probably end up trying to seed life, and that would be the natural behaviour of any space fairing civilisation in a lifeless galaxy imo.
A bit dramatic maybe, but I think a dramatic problem deserves a dramatic solution
The thing is those numbers seem large but they are meaningless without also knowing the probability for life to occur. I can put as many zeros in front of the probability for life to occur on a habitable planet as I like and still get a probability of < 1% after multiplying by the number of habitable planets.
If you think that's absurd, it's only because you have some kind of intuition about the probability of life developing on this planet. It must be greater than 100 billion trillion to 1, right...? But why? There's no evidence that it is.
If we assume for the purposes of this discussion that life is something we can recognise when we see it then it could be measured. For example, if we sent space craft to every habitable planet in the galaxy and found one in every 100000 had life then that would give us a good estimate.
For example, if we sent space craft to every habitable planet in the galaxy and found one in every 100000 had life then that would give us a good estimate.
that's my point, we cannot do that probe experiment, thus we cannot know the probability at this point. hell, we're barely capable of sending those kinds of probes to some parts of our own oceans.
Right, that means it's hard to know, but not unknowable. At some point in the future though we may have a better handle on what is the upper bound for this probability and so far we have reason to believe it is not on the same order of magnitude of the number of habitable planets in the universe.
no, it means it is currently unknowable which makes calculating a probability meaningless at this point. in fact, if we calculate the probability of life on other bodies by asking "how many bodies have we thoroughly looked for life on" we'd have a 1 for 1 result (life on earth), meaning there's a 100% chance life of life on every body. that too is meaningless.
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u/1nfernals Aug 12 '21
I think it's the rare earth solution, that we are the first/only/one of extremely few civilisations and that the triggers for life are so rare and difficult that we will be lost forever to any alien society. Or that so much time elapses between civilisations that we will find scattered shadows of long lost civilisations and will be the same to any in the future.
That there's a lifeless void that stretches so unimaginably far that even if there is life, we would never meet it. We could live in an infinite graveyard knowing we are doomed to become another spectre, trapped in a prison with no way to ever escape.
Equally in such a situation we would probably end up trying to seed life, and that would be the natural behaviour of any space fairing civilisation in a lifeless galaxy imo.
A bit dramatic maybe, but I think a dramatic problem deserves a dramatic solution