View Single Post
Suzerain of Sheol Suzerain of Sheol is offline
Desolation Denizen
Default   #7  
I really, really hope it isn't an indication of any sort of life they've found there. Nick Bostrom has an essay on why that would be very bad that I'll link below for anyone who's interested, but for the short of it: the paucity of life we can observe (i.e. none, so far, that we've been able to detect) means that there is some kind of hurdle in the development of life on a planet that must be crossed in order for life to take root. If that hurdle is something on the micro level that we already passed long ago... that's great! Onward and upward and all that.

But if it's something on the macro level that causes developed civilizations to go extinct before they can spread to inter-planetary or inter-stellar proportions, that means it's still ahead of us, which doesn't bode well, since we can detect no civilization that has in fact passed said hurdle (which is inconclusive evidence, but we can only go off what we have). There are, of course, other factors to consider such as the likelihood of sentient life evolving as opposed to non-sentient life, and how unique the particular evolutionary traits that let us build civilizations at all are, even among hypothetical sentient extra-terrestrial life, but it's still worrying to consider.

For the more detailed version: http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
Cold silence has a tendency
to atrophy any sense of compassion
between supposed lovers.
Between supposed brothers.
Old Posted 11-22-2012, 09:23 PM Reply With Quote