Why does it seriously feel like NASA is making more announcements of pretty big importance lately?
I know this probably isn't that big of a deal, but fuck, this still holds weight.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/new-nasa-study-reveals-origin-of-organic-matter-in-apollo-lunar-samples@previous (B)
it could mean all the movies where "ancient origin species" who've dominated the galaxy and build megastructures and consume everything they come across
could be our destiny as a species. maybe we ARE the first, and possibly not the only life to ever exist. but, in a few billion years if intelligent life doesn't collapse then maybe we'll be the aliens to fear on far away worlds.
but, i think it's more likely that life is easy to start and gets harder and harder to perpetuate as complexity grows. so, like you'll find organic matter in meteors and probably all over the place all the easy organic chemistry. but you won't find cells on asteroids, for cells you need quite a lot less hostile environments. i think recently they explained amino acids in comet trails, but no animals of course falling out.
life on earth is possible because the environment is just perfect for higher order life to thrive, and earth like environments are likely really pretty rare. but, i bet that on any kind of earth life planet i bet you'll find more than just amino acids. but, maybe not more than amoeba, especially if the solar system isn't very close to ours as well. Jupiter acts like a vacuum for meteors keeping us safe(ish) from too frequent asteroid impacts, but if there were less heavy giants out there then there would still be way more asteroids just around to perturb. there could be a goldilocks zone earth sized water heavy planet out there just perfect for life, but, with impacts every few million years higher order life would have a very hard time surviving extinction after extinction.
i would not have a hard time believing that the chances of very high order life (such as monkeys that can build quantum computers) are incredibly slight to begin with, and i also wouldn't be surprised if the "great filter" theory is correct and that
for some reason higher order life is highly improbable and that one day we too will fall victim to some unforeseen
thing that will stop us from becoming more than a class 0 civilization.
part of the problem is that we don't really know. it could be that life like ours happens
all the time but lasts very briefly and never advances far enough to "be seen" by any galactic neighbors. it's
possible that earths exist all over but that the environments of planets change frequently and drastically. As they say Mars used to have giant oceans and rivers, but now it's a desert. as life was developing on earth the environment here was toxic to life today, but early microbes helped to terraform the environment and after jupiter cleared out enough dangerous rocks and life had hundreds of million of years to thrive it was able to gain great complexity. but, after the last great extinction we've had not a lot longer than other species before us, but we've achieved incredible things in the briefest little period of time (in the last few hundred years.) at this point we even emit a lot of radio that could
maybe be detectable by someone somewhere somewhen. but if the great filter is
correct then something is going to prevent us from doing that for a long enough time that life out there could even have a chance of seeing us. If we extinct ourselves with nuclear war then aliens would only have a 100 year window to really have a chance at seeing us with radio telescopes.
so maybe even there was some life like us out there that evolved just before us and they used radio and extincted themselves with nukes and we only just discovered radio right as their last transmissions were hitting earth. we'd have zero chance of seeing or finding any live that lived and quit transmitting long enough ago. so it could be that life, even super higher order life, isn't even rare. but living at the exact right time and have the exact right tech to detect them might be way, way more unlikely.
or, maybe the tech we're using now is actually pretty unsophisticated. maybe broadcasting radio and shit is going to be replaced with star trek "sub space" and we quit broadcasting in radio altogether. apply that everywhere and any sufficiently sophisticated life making radio transmitters would eventually go beyond. then that would mean we'll only have a brief widow to listen for radio and again the odds of finding life when it is only discoverable for a couple of hundred years makes it extremely challenging to find when we're in a universe with timescales in the billions of years.
but, maybe we discover "sub space" and switch it on and suddenly hear the chatter of hundreds of thousands of advanced aliens all over the
universe. @618,014 (squeegee)
Where did the water come from? Should we be afraid of it? Is there more life in the water or in the ground? Do you ever wish we had more? Would you be more surprised to happen upon a completely submerged planet or one with split of land and sea similar to this thing?
@618,014 (squeegee)
dude, you're fucking brilliant. are you sure you're not an astronomer?
@618,032 (D)
> Where did the water come from?
water isn't rare at all. we're pretty much finding it everywhere we look.
> Should we be afraid of it?
i guess i don't get the question, because, well, no
> Is there more life in the water or in the ground?
i don't know, just that 100% of life we know requires it.
> Do you ever wish we had more?
i always wanted a pool growing up
> Would you be more surprised to happen upon a completely submerged planet or one with split of land and sea similar to this thing?
it would just depend on the size, i would be surprised to see a planet of sufficient size have features and i would be surprised to see a small enough planet be flat enough for water to fully submerge everything
@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
nah, but if i was a smarter person i might've gone into the field, it's fascinating.
@618,036 (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
don't you mean astrologer?
Maybe they should make contracts with the WWE for funding.
@618,072 (G)
No, that's just silly pseudo-science leftover from the dark ages.