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artemium comments on Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Horrible news!!! Organic molecules have just been found on Mars. It appears that the great filter is ahead of us.
We've known for some time that Titan has plenty of organic molecules.
The article says:
There's also matter exchange from earth to mars that could have brought life that originated on earth to mars.
Yeah, I know that there are other filters behind us, but I just found it as a funny coincidence while I was in the middle of the facebook discussion about Great Filter and someone shared this Bostrom's article .
This only means that the great filter is not due to the difficulty of creating organic compounds. (In fact, creating organic compounds was already very low on a list of things that might be the cause of an early filter, or maybe even already effectively ruled out.).
It still could be a step between this and where we are now. For example, it could be the creation of Eukaryotes. Or it could be intelligence. Or other things.
Anything other than methane which is the simplest organic molecule there is (CH4) and, as far as I remember, has been detected in interstellar gas..?
Detecting methane per se isn't what's interesting about this. You don't need life to produce methane; there's plenty of it in the outer solar system, Titan for example is covered in the stuff, and it's been detected on Mars before. But it's a small enough molecule that Mars daylight temperatures can give it enough velocity to escape from the planet's gravity well, which means that if you detect nontrivial quantities in Mars' atmosphere it's probably being actively replenished somehow. Fluctuating levels of methane, which is what's actually new about the Curiosity measurements, are strong evidence for active replenishment.
This doesn't necessarily mean life -- there are other possibilities involving deep geology of various kinds -- but life is one of the candidate explanations. Though if it is life, it's probably simple, boring microbial life similar to what appeared quite early in Earth's history, so I think artemium is overselling the Great Filter implications on a couple of levels.
Sure, but there are tons of geological processes which produce methane without any involvement of life.
The discovery of methane spikes is certainly interesting, but to go from there to changing the Great Filter estimates is a looooooong jump.
I don't disagree.
What's horrible about that?
We don't know whether the Great Filter is ahead of us or behind us. The more evidence we find that life is common throughout the universe, the more the probability mass moves towards "ahead of us", because more "behind us" possibilities have been eliminated.
In addition to the point made by ChristianKI that this may be non-biological, the origin of life is not the only possible Great Filter aspect which could be in our past. Other candidates for example include the rise of multicellular life, the development of complex brain systems (this one is not that likely since it seems to have developed multiple times in different lineages), the development of fire and the development of language.