Quote:
Originally Posted by Slappin Fish
Maybe right there looking at you. bacteria has no idea it's being 'visited' when it's under the microscope.
Look at the progress we've made in the past 50 years, you have to think civilizations millions of years more advanced don't clumsily drag their shit around.
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Oh, there's bacteria everywhere. but it's not intelligent.
Here's the line of thinking scientists who are open to all possibilities and who are much much smarter than all of us put together have,
They ask why hasn't any evidence been found? It's a valid question and you'd be hard-pressed to find any ego in that quest.
specifically, their thinking addresses how the process of intelligent life is understood-
With no evidence of intelligent life other than ourselves, it appears that the process of starting with a star and ending with "advanced explosive lasting life" must be unlikely. This implies that at least one step in this process must be improbable. Hanson's list, while incomplete, describes the following nine steps in an "evolutionary path" that results in the colonization of the observable universe:
The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
Reproductive molecules (e.g., RNA)
Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
Complex (archaeatic and eukaryotic) single-cell life
Sexual reproduction
Multi-cell life
Tool-using animals with big brains
Where we are now
Colonization explosion.
According to the Great Filter hypothesis at least one of these steps - if the list were complete - must be improbable. If it's not an early step (i.e., in our past), then the implication is that the improbable step lies in our future and our prospects of reaching step 9 (interstellar colonization) are still bleak. If the past steps are likely, then many civilizations would have developed to the current level of the human race. However, none appear to have made it to step 9, or the Milky Way would be full of colonies. So perhaps step 9 is the unlikely one, and the only thing that appears likely to keep us from step 9 is some sort of catastrophe or the resource exhaustion leading to impossibility to make the step due to consumption of the available resources (like for example highly constrained energy resources). So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.