TitaniumDragon comments on Exterminating life is rational - Less Wrong

17 Post author: PhilGoetz 06 August 2009 04:17PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 28 May 2014 12:33:17PM 0 points [-]

Indeed, we have very strong evidence against it: surely, intelligent life has arisen elsewhere in the universe, and we would see galaxies being annihilated by high-end weaponry.

That's a bad argument. We don't know for sure that intelligent life has arisen. The fact that we don't see events like that can simply mean that we are the first.

Comment author: TitaniumDragon 28 May 2014 10:42:05PM 0 points [-]

That's a pretty weak argument due to the mediocrity principle and the sheer scale of the universe; while we certainly don't know the values for all parts of the Drake Equation, we have a pretty good idea, at this point, that Earth-like planets are probably pretty common, and given that abiogenesis occurred very rapidly on Earth, that is weak evidence that abiogenesis isn't hard in an absolute sense.

Most likely, the Great Filter lies somewhere in the latter half of the equation - complex, multicellular life, intelligent life, civilization, or the rapid destruction thereof. But even assuming that intelligent life only occurs in one galaxy out of every thousand, which is incredibly unlikely, that would still give us many opportunities to observe galactic destruction.

It is theoretically possible that we're the only life in the Universe, but that is incredibly unlikely; most Universes in which life exists will have life exist in more than one place.

Comment author: ChristianKl 29 May 2014 01:13:34AM 0 points [-]

given that abiogenesis occurred very rapidly on Earth, that is weak evidence that abiogenesis isn't hard in an absolute sense.

We don't even know that it occurred on earth at all. It might have occurred elsewhere in our galaxy and traveled to earth via asteroids.

most Universes in which life exists will have life exist in more than one place.

Why? I don't see any reason why that should be the case. If you take for example posts that internet forum users write most of the time most users who write posts only write one post.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 June 2014 08:01:02AM 1 point [-]

We don't even know that it occurred on earth at all. It might have occurred elsewhere in our galaxy and traveled to earth via asteroids.

That would make it more likely that there's life on other planets, not less likely.

Comment author: ChristianKl 01 June 2014 08:55:18AM *  1 point [-]

Most planets and stars in the universe are not in our galaxy. If our galaxy has a bit of unicellular life because some very rare event happened and is the only galaxy with life, that fits to a universe where we are the only intelligent species.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 June 2014 10:03:00AM 0 points [-]

It looks like you accidentally submitted your comment before finishing it (or there's a misformatted link or something).

Comment author: ChristianKl 01 June 2014 01:00:03PM 0 points [-]

I corrected it.