a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by byonic
byonic  ·  1152 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 12:30 p.m.—Perseverance Mars Rover landing day livestream for all students

I think we’re at a pretty similar spot here, I really do think there’s other life out there- just that it seems so unlikely we’ll find it it’s effectively not there at all, at least in a human timescale. Which is why finding it at close as Mars would be pretty devastating in my mind. Of course, finding microbes or something wouldn’t have to mean imminent death, I would just be much more nervous.

I think most calculations there are at least a couple of orders of magnitude off. Doing some rough napkin math, over the course of the 3.5 billion years we’ve had 1 (2 if you’d want to include Neanderthals maybe) gain enough intelligence for my arbitrary definition to include them as “intelligent”. One could maybe argue some of the smarter animals should be included but I don’t think it’s going to affect the math much. If a species is a “type” of life form, then there’s 8.7M now, or about 8.7B ever if the internet isn’t lying to me. Sticking with the million to be safe, we’re at about 2/8.7M or 2.229e5% every 3.5B years if I’m doing that right.

Then we’re the only example of intelligent life we know of to even dabble in space exploration and communication, so I’m not sure how to estimate that part - on one hand it’s hard for me to imagine intelligent life not staring at the stars and reaching out for them, on the other hand I’m stuck in my human existence and probably wouldn’t understand what a different intelligent life form’s existence is like if I had one sitting in front of me explaining. It might be unlikely even at cosmic scales, or it might be near 100%