philh comments on Astrobiology III: Why Earth? - Less Wrong

17 Post author: CellBioGuy 04 October 2016 09:59PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (12)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: CellBioGuy 04 October 2016 10:00:49PM *  11 points [-]

Advice solicited. Topics of interest I have lined up for upcoming posts include:

  • The history of life on Earth and its important developments
  • The nature of the last universal common ancestor (REALLY good new research on this just came out)
  • The origin of life and the different schools of thought on it
  • Another exploration of time in which I go over a paper that came out this summer that basically did exactly what I did a few months earlier with my "Space and Time Part II" calculations of our point in star and planet order that showed we are not early and are right around when you would expect to find the average biosphere, but extended it to types of stars and their lifetimes in a way I think I can improve upon.
  • My thoughs on how and why SETI has been sidetracked away from activities that are more likely to be productive towards activities that are all but doomed to fail, with a few theoretical case studies
  • My thoughts on how the Fermi paradox / 'great filter' is an ill-posed concept
  • Interesting recent research on the apparent evolutionary prerequisites for primate intelligence

Any thoughts on which of these are of particular interest, or other ideas to delve into?

Comment author: philh 05 October 2016 10:40:48AM 2 points [-]

I'd find all of these interesting, particularly the first three and the last.

I'm glad you're back.