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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

I think less interesting than life originating elsewhere is that this line of reasoning means earth is seeding life throughout the galaxy in real time. It’s fully possible that we are the first life in the universe, after all the first life would look up and wonder why the universe seemed unpopulated. Well - assuming all this adds up to life populated planets being able to seed other life potentially populated planets, we may be the first and only life in the galaxy, but we won’t likely be the last. We’ve been spewing life filled ice and dust into space for quite some time.

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Barring absurd circumstances, so would the 2nd through the 10th life in the universe think this. After all, for them, there's barely any more existing life than for the 1st.

And, if instead we narrow it such that "the first life would think this for the first 100 years of its awareness that there might be more life out there"...

Then it also becomes true for the 11th through the 100,000th life born, because the first 100 years is also the almost certainly a low level of technology and of just not having spent enough time looking.

Thus, the fact that we say "it looks empty" does not do us any good in determining whether we are #1 or #100,000, or even higher still.

It sucks that we will be extinct soon, and didn't get to figure out which number (roughly) we are.

If only we could put a colony on Mars...

Putting a colony on Mars won’t save us from our rather unredeemable quality of being human. If we ruined one planet, we can ruin two.

Realistically, terraforming mars for sustained independent settlements is likely not within our technological horizon before we wipe ourselves off this planet.

Life will survive us. I think we think too highly of ourselves.

I don’t think we will end human civilization either though. The fact we could inhabit the moon and eventually mars at all means we could adapt to a inhospitable earth pretty easily. Maybe there will be much fewer of us and we wouldn’t like that life, but our future descendants would know nothing different and would be adapted to that civilization. But in the time spans of geology life will be resilient to whatever we do.

>The fact we could inhabit the moon and eventually mars at all means we could adapt to a inhospitable earth pretty easily.

Hmm, not so fast. I don't think we've proved that at all.

We can "inhabit" those in the same way that I can "inhabit" the bottom of a pool.

In fact, as a numbers game: we've been on the moon during all the Apollo missions for ~3.5 days. Modern humanoids are about 200,000 years old. Or in other words, we've inhabited the moon for 5e-8 % of humanities' existence.

The record for holding one's breath is ~25 minutes by a guy called Budimir Šobat. Say their lifespan is 85 years. That's about 5e-7 % of their life. Or in other words, they've "inhabited" the bottom of the pool for 10x longer than humanity as a species has "inhabited" the moon.

I wouldn't feel comfortable saying his record proves we can inhabit the bottom of a pool, and I think the same has to be applied to the moon.

We have to consider self-sufficiency as a condition of whether or not we're really considered as native inhabitants of a place, or just a temporary extension of the mother planet.

In that regard, we honestly can't even really prove equilibrium with our home planet's resources, let alone an inhospitable one like mars or the moon.

I'm sure we could sustain a colony of 50 people on mars for the rest of their natural lives. Pack them enough air and snacks, and I'm sure it's doable today. However, I'm much more skeptical that we could do that without constant resupply for an indefinite period. Yeah, we might be able to conceivably generate electricity, purify water, oxygen, grow food, etc on-site, but what happens when those solar panels start to fail at 50 years, or the mechanical interlocks on the airlocks start to become excessively leaky, or the HVAC systems fail? None of that equipment can be regenerated on mars.

right these are the extremes. But my point is life on earth no matter how inhospitable we make the planet would be strictly easier than on the moon, or mars. I don’t think we will go extinct, but we may become greatly diminished.

I think that Mars is overrated. It is smaller than Earth, and way more difficult to live there, so we would get like 30% extra space for 1000 times the cost per square meter.

And then what? We do not have a third planet like that nearby. Mercury and Venus are too hot. Jupiter and Saturn are gas with no solid surface. Uranus and Neptune are ice. The next solar system is way too far.

I suspect that if we ever get the ability to travel to the next solar system, it will probably be easier to just stay in space, and only use the planets to mine the resources. Even for that, asteroids may be more convenient.

So, from this perspective, Earth is, and will remain, unique.

Yes, my point isn’t as much the position of ordering for life, but that we are seeding the galaxy already to spread life in the mechanism being discussed. I think that’s more interesting frankly than the possibility our life was seeded. We know the former is actually happening for a fact. The latter is a possibility.

Why would we go extinct? We will transform earth to our needs and when the time is right we expand to space. Maybe not with our current biological body, but something different.

> Why would we go extinct? We will transform earth to our needs and when the time is right we expand to space.

At present, we are transforming Earth to our short term needs, but against our long term needs. The timescales don't match, because expanding to space should take several centuries, but we are risking wrecking the planet after only two centuries of industrial civilization, roughly. So it's wise to be afraid of extinction.

This is just not true. We are changing the earth in ways that is killing existing life but we are not threatening the existence of life or humanity as a whole. No matter what happens humans will adapt and life will evolve to fill new niches.

Full extinction seems unlikely, yeah.

Reverting to low-tech after civilizational collapse... that one seems far too plausible to me.

And we've used up loads of the easily-accessed coal and oil. industrial revolution 2.0 may not actually be feasible.

I can't see how you're so confident. As we continue to haphazardly destabilizing the climate and the environment there could be catastrophic tipping points that we're currently unaware of.

Life survived through much worse climate changes and ecological destabilizations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archean

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_...

While what is happenings is extremely bad for our perception of what life is like, life itself has been through much worse.

That's such a callous and ghoulish attitude to me. Human consciousness and civilization are nature's greatest achievement. We should not let it be extinguished. Nature will not be able to recreate it, at least not on this planet.

I’m not saying it’s good or bad, I’m saying life will survive us.

I’m not particularly eager to see humanity extinguished or the world reset into another age. But if it happens, life won’t be gone from the universe even if there’s only life here on earth.

Nature might, who knows? And maybe we are just “programmed” to feel our own importance, and thats perhaps necessary but not sufficient to save us.

I would genuinely enjoy reading published science that supports your proposition. I've not seen much, if any.

We probably won’t go extinct. But the population will probably strongly plummet and we may lose the ability to go to space. If someone told me we would be back to subsistence level existence in 100 years, I would not be surprised.

Need at least 1B to make space faring economic.

Arguably we currently don't have the ability to go "to space" for any meaningful definition of "space". We barely set foot on Luna a couple of times and since then only went a couple hundred kilometers up. We haven't even reached another planet, we have one (or is it two?) probes barely in interstellar space, no ambition to reach another star at all.

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