this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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My favorite is how ignorant people are so certain about some issue that top scientists are unsure about.
If you point out that we don't know whether there's any life in the galaxy except on Earth, folks will say there has to be because look how many other planets there are, or even say you're arrogantly self centered for entertaining the idea that there isn't.
And you aren't even saying there isn't life, just that we don't know... which is true.
Doesn't discredit the idea that life is out there, it's just being honest with the data we have collected, so far.
I suspect life is everywhere. I base this on the fact that our DNA complexity is currently around 2.5-3 billion years older than the planet. Intelligent, and more importantly multicellular, life is the variable that can't be determined quite yet. The step from single cellular life to multicellular life has happened a few times on Earth, but all of those times have been in the last billion years. I personally believe that is because we are just about as young as intelligent life could possibly be, since the universe was actively hostile to life prior to about 7.5 billion years ago.
I also like the idea that for a few hundred million years (around half a billion years after the big bang) the entire universe was the correct temperature for life to have developed literally everywhere and anywhere.
That doesn't mean DNA existed before the earth. It is possible that at low complexities different factors dominated the exponential increase assumed to reach that figure
"I base this on the fact that our DNA complexity is currently around 2.5-3 billion years older than the planet."
That isn't a fact, it's extrapolation based on a simple exponential fit to rough estimates of present-day genome complexity.
Even if we knew complexity always grew exponentially, which we don't, small changes in an exponential fit will greatly affect an extrapolation.
And we don't know what the genome complexity was of the first prokaryotes, not to mention any number of forms of life that might have gone extinct between then and now.
For example, there was a group a of multi-cellular life that flourished long before the current group, but they lived for millions of years. We'll probably never know anything about their genetic complexity.
Maybe there is, maybe there isn't.
The odds of existing within a region close enough to find each other is rather small. The odds of existing during the same time period in history are infinitely approaching zero. Humans have existed for a very short amount of time, and we're currently more likely to wipe ourselves out than we are to leave the solar system in a spacecraft.
That doesn't mean life couldn't possibly exist, just that it's extremely unlikely that we will ever cross paths.
Can we say we are 99.999% certain?
Is there Intelligent life is the real question.
No we can't. We have almost zero information about how rare life is.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66786611
Only 120 light years away. That would imply the milky way is teaming.
Amen, same with the machine learning haters nowadays, pretending they know exactly how the llms work that not even the scientists working on them understand. And they can extrapolate how useless and bad this technology is
I think part of this particular problem stems from experts in the field making pretty wild claims while not still not completely understanding the tech.
Now a lot of this is prompted by market and media interest, but companies like Open AI taking advantage of this interest by making obtuse claims for funding purposes isn't exactly helping.
It IS wild, it is very special that we have a new field we don't fully understand how or why it works. No need to excuse blatant misinformation from just people guesstimating using their basic IT skills
50,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong