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DavidPlumpton comments on Astrobiology III: Why Earth? - Less Wrong Discussion

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

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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: DavidPlumpton 07 October 2016 06:33:06AM 1 point [-]

Have you ever seen this paper that claims a complexity analysis of the Viking lander experiment results can't be explained by chemistry alone? Interesting stuff...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257958533_Complexity_Analysis_of_the_Viking_Labeled_Release_Experiments

Comment author: CellBioGuy 07 October 2016 10:44:20PM *  1 point [-]

Now I have!

I think their case is weak but it is something to continue to be considered when analyzing any new data. There's weird soil chemistry there for sure, a good deal of which might be explicable from the interaction between perclorate and small amounts of organics, but the amount of data is tiny and I would not rule out soil microbes. A lot more work has to be done before you can say much with confidence.

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