re: Edinburgh/MIT scientists to announce evidence for life in Venus’ atmosphere

The universe may offer a bigger variety of ways to try to destroy us than we may have previously estimated? Unawareness of of these threats is than the illusion of safety; it's a bar to do anything about them.

Venus seems like a planet sized stomach. A giant high pressure toxic chemical vat, we have life-like things besides bacteria that thrive in guts, most mammals do. It's not crazy to think they might develop elsewhere.

If there is life there, it could have come from earth. Microbes can survive being flung out into space from an asteroid impact.

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So it is just a reference to the extreme difficulty for life to get to interstellar / far future humanity science fiction levels?

Do that view it as a law that such a filter MUST and ALWAYS stops life? Or just referencing to the low odds of a single form of life advancing to that level.

Because the latter seems completely reasonable and lines up with one of my biggest problems with the "Look how many stars there are" analysis of whether or not highly intelligent life exists out there.

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It's really just one of several high-level theories to explain the Fermi paradox. If you aren't familiar, the Fermi paradox is basically the following question: "if it is statistically likely that life exists outside of Earth, why is there no evidence of alien civilizations?"

The "Great Filter" theory suggests that we don't see signs of advanced alien civilizations because they are exceedingly rare or don't exist at all. But there are many other plausible explanations for the Fermi paradox:

- Mass colonization throughout the galaxy is not economically feasible, even for a highly advanced alien civilization.

- Advanced alien civilizations don't want to be found.

- Alien civilizations are so different from humans that we aren't capable of recognizing signs of their existence/communication.

- Our technology simply isn't advanced enough to detect the signs of intelligent life.

One thing about the paradox I find interesting is that we, as humans, tend to be pretty presumptuous. For example - since we would likely colonize the galaxy and actively search for extraterrestrial intelligence if we had the technology to do so, we assume that other alien species would do the same. But the reality is that we don't have the technology to colonize the galaxy, and we have no idea how our views as a species might change once we reach that point.

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Not really. “Simple life” could be prokaryotic and not eukaryotic with the great filter being the jump to eukaryotic life.

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That's where I fall on this. As our imaging and analysis technology improves we are going to find there are prokaryotes everywhere. We are going to find that the great filter is in the jump to becoming eukaryotic.

They only thing that makes me question that maybe the filter is ahead of us is that there are some eight million seven hundred thousand species on Earth that have made that jump, largely independently. It's possible there are thousands or millions of other human level intelligences out there, but something kills them off before they can reach interplanetary or interstellar communication or travel. We aren't able to find them, and they can't find us yet.

My bet is either self destruction through nuclear level war or some kind of interplanetary event. Planet killing asteroid or solar event kind of stuff.

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the Atcama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.

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Been there... very large place out on the middle of no where.

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They only thing that makes me question that maybe the filter is ahead of us is that there are some eight million seven hundred thousand species on Earth that have made that jump, largely independently. It's possible there are thousands or millions of other human level intelligences out there, but something kills them off before they can reach interplanetary or interstellar communication or travel. We aren't able to find them, and they can't find us yet.

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There's also the "water world hypothesis", which is (somewhat) supported by life on Earth. The idea is basically that it takes a water world to spawn life, but that it takes land-based evolution to evolve toward civilization. In other words, look at dolphins and whales as examples of highly evolved species that have not developed civilizations because they never left the ocean.

It's really just another version of the rare-Earth hypothesis, with the added caveat that not only do you need liquid water - you also need continental land masses.

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Not really. “Simple life” could be prokaryotic and not eukaryotic with the great filter being the jump to eukaryotic life.

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Yea but we have evidence of that happening multiple independent times on this planet alone so it can’t be that rare.

The other poster is right, if true this isn’t good news. It means that we have yet to reach some barrier that prevents a species from becoming interstellar. Otherwise, why don’t we see evidence of advanced life everywhere?

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If there is life there, it could have come from earth. Microbes can survive being flung out into space from an asteroid impact.

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We have crashed instruments/probes onto Venus' surface as far back as 1970 (estimate). So we could have accidentally contaminated the planet as well.

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Sneaky__Sally


Those are good questions, I think. Could the "filter" not just be preventing intelligent species from reaching each other?

In the things I've read about the filter-after-where-we-are, there's this assumption that, even absent faster-than-light travel, species will branch out gradually to new habitable worlds, or terraform them, and we'll start bumping into each other.

That's a hell of an assumption, I think, given the size of the universe. And I fail to see how an intelligent species would ever make it to a second galaxy, absent something that would probably smell like pseudoscience if you tried to describe it.

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And humanity is not doing a pristine job of indicating it knows how to control its momentum in a manner that would be conducive for long term / continued advancement. I think we are seeing more and more that not only are there huge obstacles in terms of just the violence of space, but also in how an intelligent species conducts itself that inhibits advancement to the sort of super intelligent beings we think of in these kinds of conversations

For more on the Drake Equation, the Great Filter and the Fermi thing, etc. there is a pretty good 20 minute clip on You Tube entitled Are We Alone by Aperture.

I found it a very understandable video about a complex topic. Highly recommend.

Also recommend Aperture’s short videos entitled Shower Thoughts that are funny and thought provoking. Very fast paced.