I often wonder why these are always auxiliary conversations. Ever since I was young, like most kids (I have 4), I also had this deep yearning for knowledge on life external to earth. Wonder why this never has gone mainstream.
But I think the reason it’s not talked about more is that our knowledge is essentially non existent and hasn’t really changed in, say, the last fifty years?
The Drake equation is a nice framework to determine the probability of life outside of our planet. Sure, the end result is still a big mystery, but many of the variables in the Drake equation have been solved or narrowed down (e.g., star formation, planet formation, etc.). To say that there has been no progress in the last 50 years is silly.
I think that would be a different answer if we found inorganic life, as that would blow up the concept of organic life as singular in "life" bearing capability. I doubt we would recognize inorganic life as "life" in that case however, as humanity has a poor working definition of "life."
Absent a recognizably intelligent form of life found off planet, I doubt much would change (practically or existentially) for us here on earth.
The anthropic principal becomes less compelling; to say nothing of the religious implications.
Religion will last for a very long time into the future, forget about major lasting change on that front other than some rearguard action to ensure survival.
Until the 1970's or so it was getting better, since then it's gotten worse if anything.
On the Christian side we have whole continents that are following some cliff notes' version of Christianity, mostly centered around money and some opportunistic politics. On the Islamic side a small group of fanatics has managed to divide the world in a way that seemed unthinkable 25 years ago and so on.
Some people think Christians would have a hard time with extra-Terran life because the Bible doesn't mention any life other than the life here, and therefore any such life would arguably be free from the weight of Original Sin, yada yada yada. But I'm pretty sure if life on another planet was discovered (even intelligent life) they would just reinterpret the Biblical references that seem to refer to "Earth" as referring to "The Universe" and make "The Garden of Eden" a metaphor, and the flaming sword would become a supernova, blah, etc., yada, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, approximately 0.0% of Christians would say "Hmm... the Bible is obviously incomplete and or inaccurate, so maybe the whole thing is a load of bollocks" or whatever. And I expect it would be about the same for every other faith.
This is popularly misunderstood. We obviously don't see Type 3 civilizations, but if another of our own civilization was in our galaxy, we would have had an very small to extremely small chance of seeing it.
I'd wager life is everywhere, and just as is the case on earth, it pays, in terms of survival, to blend in with your surroundings.
Or we might get a repeat of when the Spanish brought disease to the Inca and Maya.
The mere knowledge of life is viable off-Earth is huge. If we find it on our nearest neighbour, the chances of encountering it elsewhere rise markedly. Hopefully it would trigger a search elsewhere in the solar system, like Europa.
Unlikely. There's been no animal hosts on Mars, in which such a micro-organism might have evolved to threaten humans on Earth.
Not to say we shouldn't be careful for other reasons though. The bigger risk is the sudden extinction of entirely different branches of life, by more highly-evolved Earth-originating species.
It depends on how different it is chemically form earth life. If it is similar enough that it shares a common origin, it's no big deal. If it isn't, then that's a massive deal because it means life originated twice in one solar system, therefore is probably widespread.
Edit for a TL;DR - The basic idea is that, if we don't see evidence of intelligent life in the universe, it must be because star traveling species must be rare. If we find life evolving twice in one solar system, then the early parts of life evolving must be relatively easy - which suggests the later parts of life becoming technologically advanced are the hard parts. In other words, life on Mars may mean that there may be more problems ahead of us than behind us.
Simply verifying distance between two similar things isn't a sufficient variable to answer questions about distinctiveness of origin.
1. Life
2. Multicellular life
3. Intelligent life
4. Interstellar colonization tech
If you make it through all levels you should be colonizing the galaxy and detectable by us therefore.
Finding life with a separate origin than ours removes one of the possible spots for the great filter and makes it significantly more likely that the great filter is ahead of us rather than behind.
This is a question that will help with the survival of humanity.
If you don't consider "does life exist on other planets?" to be a fundamental, existential question, can you share an example of what you do think is such a fundamental question?
Finding life on Mars wouldn't necessarily resolve any fundamental questions, but it would open up a whole new realm of questions. Is it similar to life on Earth? How similar? Is there evidence for or against some form of panspermia? (at its most extreme, life arriving on Earth from outside the solar system, but this could also be life arising on Earth and being transported to Mars via impact ejecta, or vice versa)
Also, lots of worthwhile science is done even though it doesn't have an immediate and obvious impact on everyday life. I can't think of any particular way in which the discovery of gravitational waves has changed my life, for example - but I recognize that the work that's gone into it has advanced human knowledge, and probably will indirectly benefit my life (or my descendants' lives) in ways I can't predict.
Is the concept of objective meaning valid in any possible universe?
Is it possible for the universe to be a fully observed deterministic system?
Is there a universal objective function motivating what we consider reality?
Is it possible to determine with certainty the origins of what we can conceptualize as reality?
Is it possible to forecast with mathematical certainty events in future time steps.
Basically just off the top of my head my questions boil down to: Can laplaces demon actually exist, is there a resolution to the munchausen trilemma and is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable.
That being said, for most people who aren't operating on your level, the fundamental existential questions haven't changed much in a few hundred years. "Are we alone in the universe?" is probably among the newest for us.
Your questions are valid and really interesting, but that doesn't make the questions of "Do other planets have life?" and "Where did life on Earth originate?" invalid or uninteresting. Personally I'm interested in all of them.
And yet despite the certainty of death, we, individually and as a group, seem to have an unquenchable desire to know more. To know is to grow, and this collection of processes we call life has never been seen off the planet so yeah, it'd be quite some growth.
Do you actually understand its proof? On what basis would it be disproven? It's really difficult for me to even conceive of what disproving it would even "mean" - you seem to think that it's somehow tied to whether the universe is deterministic, but it's not. A "disproof" would essentially break the very logical tools used to construct itself (since it is the nature of these that Godel's theorem concerns); it's like trying to drive further north than the north pole - there simply isn't a conceptual direction to go unless you completely redefine the meaning of "north".
Edit: Also, Laplace's demon has likely been formally proven to be impossible: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-proof-reveals-fundamental-limi... Perhaps your apparent belief in Laplace's Demon combined with the comparison of this proof to Godel's Theorem is your motivation to suggest that it can be disproven?
I'm not proposing solutions or saying that there are errors with these proofs. Rather, when I finally understood them years ago it induced an existential crisis that I don't see any pathways to resolve.
My hypothesis is that humans aren't capable of conceptualizing experiments or building tools that could approach the three most intractable problems in epistemilogy. Maybe we don't have the math to do it, or it's fundamentally intractable and it will never be resolved, I dunno. But those are much more interesting questions than "is there an amoeba on europa?"
(That being said: I personally find "is there an amoeba on Europa?" to be supremely interesting, but to each their own.)
I should also state, I certainly find the concept of life on other planets extremely fascinating. However as I said above its insufficient to give clarity to some of the more fundamentally existential questions around our existence.
So there’s at least one of us.
Aside from the narrow one involving the oxidization of carbon, I have a hard time coming up with a definition of life that doesn’t consider storms, planets, or star systems “alive”. In particular, they are all time-limited phenomena that are organized but somewhat unpredictable at macro scale and chaotic at micro scale.
For plenty of us, AndrewKemendo is right... learning that there is life on Mars would not answer any particularly fundamental questions. Maybe because a lot of people simply take it as a given that life exists on other planets (whether or not Mars is one of them isn't really a big issue) because they don't have the hubris to believe that there's anything so special about Earth as to believe that life could only emerge here.
Frankly, you can count me in that crowd. I'd be more surprised if it was somehow proven that there isn't life anywhere else.
To me, "fundamental questions" would be more like:
1. Is free will possible? If so, how?
2. How did the universe begin? If there was a "Big Bang" as popularly described, where did all the matter come from that expanded out of the initial singularity? If time did not exist before the universe began, how did the transition from state "no universe" to state "universe" happen, since - presumably - nothing can "happen" without time.
3. What is time?
4. Is space discrete or continuous?
5. Is time discrete or continuous?
6. Are there multiple dimensions of time, analogous to the multiple dimensions of space we know about?
7. Is our "4-D" world actually embedded in a higher-dimensional reality of some sort that we can't access/understand/see/etc.?
8. Is our world a simulation (ala The Matrix)?
9. How, exactly, do fields (electromagnetic field / higgs field / etc) permeate all of space and permit the existence of particles like photons or the higgs boson?
10. Is there actually a way to unify gravity and quantum mechanics?
11. What is dark matter? Where did it come from?
12. How will the universe end? Big crunch? Big freeze? Big bounce? The simulation ends and we all just disappear? Other?
13. Why is there any matter at all in the universe? The fact that there is implies a certain fundamental asymmetry to the universe, since if matter and anti-matter were created in equal amounts at the beginning, they should have annihilated each other leaving no matter behind.
14. Why are right-handed people more common than left-handed people?
15. Why does the universe itself appear to have a "handedness" property[1]?
I feel like this should be more pervasively held belief to a bunch of people with a higher than average propensity of consuming scifi. Star Trek did a pretty thorough job of showing that the same fundamental questions persist even if we assume there exist more intelligent species out there.
You would know there's tech out there, the first able to reach to it will have the edge over the rest for centuries ahead.
The effects will be massive, no one dolar, yuan, yen, gold bar would be left unspent in the quest to get there and learn before the others.
Then there's the realities of being an american adult where even science is politicized. Think of all the boomers that grew up watching the space race with baited breath. I bet some of these same people today would support a politician who would defund NASA if it meant saving $30 a year on their taxes.
Bated, as in abated.
Fun fact: bated breath was coined by Shakespeare.
Thus many scientists try hard to dismiss evidence of alien life, because that is fashionable. Or at least, the alternative is very kitschy.
The reason people try to discount aliens is because you can attribute literally anything to aliens. And so you reach another equally simplistic binary. You discover some unknown phenomena. It is aliens, or not? Well we've discovered a whole lot of unknown phenomena throughout the years (and centuries and millennia depending on how you want to play this game) and often times it really did look a whole lot like aliens, but to date it's never yet turned out to be them.
And since the determination of an unknown phenomena often comes down to probabilities, aliens get weighted down a good deal. But nonetheless, I have no doubt that at least lurking in the back of every physicist's mind is that something now as regular as a fast radio burst could indeed finally be those LGM - the kind of joking nickname given to the first radio pulsar discovery. Standing, of course, for little green men. Is it? Well probably not, but it'll always be probably not - including when it finally is.