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+--- Thread: What are the odds? The Flip Side of Optimism About Life on Other Planets (/thread-1230.html)
What are the odds? The Flip Side of Optimism About Life on Other Planets - C C - Aug 12, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/space/the-flip-side-of-optimism-about-life-on-other-planets.html
EXCERPT: [...] You might think the discovery of microbes on Mars or fish in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa would have scientists dancing in the streets. [...] But not everyone agrees that it would be such good news. For at least one prominent thinker, it would be a “crushing blow.” That would be Nick Bostrom [...] one of the great pessimists of this or any other age. In an article published in Technology Review in 2008, Professor Bostrom declared that it would be a really bad sign for the future of humanity if we found even a microbe clinging to a rock on Mars. “Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit,” he wrote. Why?
[...] There are billions of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy [...] If only a small fraction of these develop life and technology, that would be enough to turn the whole galaxy into Times Square. The Milky Way is 10 billion years old. So where are those aliens or their artifacts? We’ve found zilch. If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now. This is known as the Fermi paradox. There are many loopholes in this argument [...] The simplest explanation, Dr. Bostrom and others say, is that there are no other spacefaring civilizations.
There must be something, he concludes, that either stops life from starting at all, or shuts it down before it can conquer the stars. He calls it the Great Filter. You can imagine all kinds of bottlenecks in the evolution of life and civilization [...] that could constitute a Great Filter. The big question for Professor Bostrom is whether the Great Filter is in our past or our future, and for the answer he looks to the stars. If there is nothing else out there, then maybe we have survived whatever it is. As bizarre as it sounds, we are the first ones in the neighborhood to have run the cosmic obstacle course.
If there is company out there, it means the Great Filter is ahead of us. We are doomed.
This is a staggeringly existential piece of knowledge to have obtained at what seems to be a tender age as a species, based on a cursory examination of a sliver of our cosmic neighborhood. It is also a truly brave exercise of the power of human reason.
Maybe too brave. But there is a precedent of sorts in an old riddle....