Study: Probability of Extraterrestrials in the Milky Way Low
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Astrobiology
Extraterrestrial Life
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A new study suggests that the probability of extraterrestrial life in the Milky Way is extremely low, sparking discussion on the implications and limitations of the research.
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Oh man, I have about 200 science fiction books to recommend to these guys.
To summarze: Extraterrestrial life doesn't have to be just like us. It could very well be aquatic, it could very well be post-biological in any of a million different ways. (See, e.g., Accelerando.) We don't even know if there's life on Ganymede; it's absolutely absurd -- frankly, it hardly even seems sane -- to rule out extraterrestrial life in the Milky Way on such shaky and unimaginative grounds.
Talking about Ganymede, if there was highly developed extraterrestrial life on par with technology within 100 years of ours we would have detected it. Nothing about what they say excludes undeveloped extraterrestrial life or microorganisms.
Aquatic life, we have examples of intelligent aquatic life on this planet but that life does not fit the "highly developed technology" requirement. We don't know how intelligent the aquatic life is but we know it is intelligent and appears to be self-aware.
Is the development of technology a key factor in determining intelligence? That seems like a philosophical question more than a scientific question but not having the answer to that does not negate the calculations that were made which require highly developed technology of two or more civilizations simultaneously.
Ganymede's an extreme example as it's quite literally next door, and we still have absolutely no idea what swims in its 60-mile-deep oceans, save to say that they're not shooting lasers through the ice or launching satellites. Do you know from what distance we'd be able to detect an Earthlike planet with extraterrestrials who are at a current-Earth tech level?
> none of them talking about advanced extraterrestrial life are built upon any known scientific testable principles that we have today.
And what testable principles are those?
Last I checked, biopoiesis is an unsolved problem, and chemical space is extremely vast -- there are many different ways to organize CHONS life, and there are also ways to organize other forms of life entirely.
Surely "they have to be just like us" is one of the most annoying scientific fallacies.
The far more likely thing is that in the next hundred years we will see our crude technology come to mimic biology.
So you're talking about an unsolved problem that has no evidence pointing to any solution. You're claiming there are different ways to organize life but where is the evidence there is different ways to organize life than what we have seen? That's how you formulate a hypothesis and then you begin to test it. Without that you're simply speaking fantasy. There are definitely unknowns but all the evidence points to life would be like us in the generic sense that it is biological and based upon similar biological compounds. It's form may take different shapes It's perception maybe things that we don't understand yet but there is zero evidence of life being capable organizing itself around a completely foreign system than what we've seen.
I welcome research in that direction to show that life can be organized around fundamentally different things than what we've seen but fantastical ideas from science fantasy stories do not help actual research happen.