So, is it safe to say that extraterrestrial sentient life is almost non-existent, or at least the probability of its existense is extremeley low?
Is homo sapiens a random mistake of evolution?
So, is it safe to say that extraterrestrial sentient life is almost non-existent...
Anthony Martin
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Jason Campbell
Extrapolate an extremely low probability across a universe with billions and billions of Earth-type planets.
But, no. It isn't 'safe to say', anyway. That would be an assumption for which there is no evidence. It appears from observing life on Earth that it will develop in the most inhospitable and bizarre conditions. There's no reason to assume that life wouldn't develop elsewhere, and that sentience would follow.
And is the relentless movement of evolution to more complex and adaptable forms a 'mistake'? Again, if us sentients were a random mutation or aberration, the sheer number of other planets capable of supporting life would guarantee it would happen again, someplace.
Michael Wood
What if animals are the aliens, but we can't communicate with them because we lack basic underlying axioms of understanding?
Christopher Ramirez
It's not sentience that is the random aberration, it's life itself. To go from
>literally random compounds in aquatic solution, with some kind of energy gradient
to
>a little machine carrying all the information necessary to replicate itself inside it in some kind of representative format, plus the molecular machinery necessary to translate that information into the physical form of another, identical little machine, all with high enough fidelity that the whole process doesn't crap out in 1 generation from destructive mutation
is one hell of a probabilistic leap. I think it's almost certain Earth has the only life in the observable universe, let alone the galaxy. Remember, if the origin of life was easy, it should have arisen multiple times on earth - but everything is descended from one common ancestor.
Leo Watson
Earth itself only developed intelligent life after 4 billion years of abiogenesis. That's a very long time for a planet and star to remain stable enough to support complex life at all. If the sun had 5% more mass, it would be a red giant by now and earth would have been swallowed while it was still evolving shimp. Most planets that can support life probably do, but very few last long enough to make like intelligent. Maybe sometimes it does make intelligent life, like dolphins, but they can't do anything because they're dolphins.
Gabriel Turner
How do you know it didn't evolve multiple times? Maybe it did. It's hard to tell. Eyes have separately evolved in different species 17 times.
Camden Anderson
>17 times
I read it was more like 40 times. This indicates that eyes aren't that hard to evolve. However, we know for certain that all living organisms so far discovered are descended from one common ancestor. They all share the same arbitrary amino acid/RNA/DNA mapping system, which could easily have been otherwise in life that had evolved independently. Once that system came into existence, it was inherited unchanged by all evolutionary pathways - it's like extremely low-level machine code; you can't fuck with it without completely fucking the rest of the organism.
Henry Cox
>all living organisms so far discovered are descended from one common ancestor
Caleb Stewart
Apparently that movie was shit and made no logical sense. Is it worth a watch?
Joseph Edwards
>So, is it safe to say that extraterrestrial sentient life is almost non-existent, or at least the probability of its existense is extremeley low?
No