Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise. What's also implausible is that, given the impossible vastness and hostility of interstellar space, that any will ever manage to contact us, specifically. Fortunately, we've got lots of crazy lifeforms here on Earth to keep us occupied, if we can take a moment to stop extincting them as fast as we possibly can.
> Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise.
I'll grant you that once we have found a single other planet with life. Until then we're doing statistics on a single data point and no, the number of planets and galaxies etc are not sufficient to statistically determine the prevalence of life because as yet none of them are confirmed to have life. This is wishful thinking and statistical truthiness.
Is the single one in a million dimensional one-hot vector special? Why?
If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random. Just the other random values don't get to ask the question...
> If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random
"It was random" in my opinion explains little. If it was sentient, maybe the dice would say "why did I land showing my '6' face? Why me?" and the answer would be many other dice landed showing their '6' faces. Random, but given enough dice rolling you'll get another '6'.
The universe is finite but it's mind-boggingly large. I think Earth is special because a- I was born there, enough said, and b- it has just the right conditions and luck for life to exist. But I don't think it's so special that it's the only planet in the whole mind-boggingly large universe to be this way. There must be other planets/dice rolling out there.
Until we find another such planet we cannot know for certain, but in my opinion it seems unlikely that these conditions don't exist anywhere else but on Earth. Why? Well, because the universe is so large -- the dice pool is very, very large.
> Statistics is a very precise science. Can you show your work or is it just a gut feeling?
In my case, my gut feeling, but is it so unlikely?
As mentioned in "Cosmos: Possible Worlds", planets may go through a "habitable zone", which is the window in which they are just the right distance from just the right star, and they have the right elements in their surface or whatnot. And then just the right random events have to happen and there's the spark of life. And then a gazillion extinction events must be averted, at times when the Tree of Life (to use the metaphor from Cosmos) is at its most fragile, when all of life could be cut down before its prime.
It sounds unlikely for any single planet, any single star system, any single galaxy, etc. But on the grand scale of the universe, it cannot be that nowhere else but here on Earth did this happen.
I don't know if this is statistics. It surely is gut feeling. But I think it's the right kind of gut feeling...
> it cannot be that nowhere else but here on Earth did this happen.
> I don't know if this is statistics. It surely is gut feeling.
It's possible that life emerging is so unlikely that it has never happened before anywhere even if it could happen again. We do not have the data to establish how likely and in fact we don't even have enough data to fill in all the gaps of how life on earth emerged in the first place. Our gut feelings are likely heavily influenced by science fiction or other priors and can't be trusted for knowledge but we are as a species very good at deluding ourselves into thinking we know things that we don't.
But that's it. Life doesn't seem so unlikely, does it? There are things we still don't understand about it, but we understand some, and it's not magic. It can happen, given the right conditions, much like mold may grow on a piece of bread under the right conditions.
What's difficult to comprehend is the immense vastness of the universe. It seems unlikely that nowhere else did the preconditions for life arise, and in fact, it seems likely that they must have arisen in multiple places. Immensely many places, in fact. Considered like that, it's more unlikely that life didn't appear anywhere else but in this Pale Blue Dot.
We look at our planet, and all that had to happen for those first lifeforms to come into existence, and it seems so unlikely... but not impossible. And we're playing with a lot of dice here! Very hard not to roll a few sixes with a bag of dice so large.
> There are things we still don't understand about it, but we understand some, and it's not magic.
> What's difficult to comprehend is the immense vastness of the universe.
We know a whole lot about ways life changes once it's there but we haven't observed life emerging from non-life and our hypotheses for how life emerged on earth has more holes than swiss cheese and it doesn't have to be magic in order to be exceedingly improbable. And magnitudes work in both ways, if it is sufficiently improbable for life to emerge, let's say 1 chance in 1E100 against then even if you had dice rolls in proportion to all the subatomic particles in the universe (~1E80) multiplied by the number of seconds since the big bang (~4E17) then it would still be about 3 orders of magnitude against the likelihood of life emerging even once. In this scenario if the probability was 4E97 then we'd expect for life to have emerged once. Until we have the data to infer what the probability actually is we can't determine which scenario is the case.
> but we haven't observed life emerging from non-life
But our laboratory is very, very small, so that proves little.
And we know life emerged at least once, and it doesn't seem particularly improbable. That's what I mean by "not magic"; not that we understand every little step, but we have some idea.
I don't think it's scifi to believe it's unlikely only Earth has sparked life. The one thing that is unlikely is that we will ever witness life anywhere else, but that's a different problem.
If you're sticking to statistics, the right answer is we don't know enough. The general rule of thumb I've seen is that you want to see n * p >= ~20 to be able to accurately assess the probability.
For the difficulty of evolution of life, we have a total N of 1-5 of life-could-have-evolved, depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you want to be about life's chances (could life have evolved on Venus? Mars? Titan? Europa? any other moons I'm forgetting about).
At this point, the statistics says more about your priors than they do about actual data, since there's not enough data to actually do any statistics on.
I do think there’s other life out there. But just considering the other side, the statistical model only applies if the existence of life is actually stochastic.
If a farmer plants a single tree in the middle of a square mile plot and rips up anything else that grows, any Fermi approximations done by the tree are going to be quite misleading.
One or more beings with power and intelligence many orders of magnitude higher than our own. To call it god or gods gives a religious tone to it that totally derails the discussion and I’m specifically avoiding. This isn’t about going to church on Sundays.
There are a few answers to the “Where are they?” question. One is that the parameters to the Drake equation mean life is so rare we actually are alone (as another commenter linked to). Another group of answers is that there is life, but something about the relationship between us means we don’t observe them. Maybe they’re hiding from us. Maybe they’re hiding from everyone.
I think the range of possible answers that people think of for this scenario is generally much too narrow. The power imbalances can be wildly greater than “they’re avoiding us”. We experience power imbalances this large every day. What’s the relationship between a Petri dish of bacteria and a person? Imagine a culture of penicillin reasoning how it came to be.
Maybe this universe is a total construction. Maybe it’s partially constructed, in the same way a farmer “makes” a farm from the Earth. If anything like that is the case, stochastic models are completely the wrong way to reason.
It would be like if I wove a basket. There’s now at least one basket made by Travis Jungroth. Surely there must be more? Out of the millions of baskets made across time, what’s the probability that only one was made by me? Even for a low probability of any individual basket, the numbers start getting decent there’s another out there.
But there’s not. I just… decided to make only one.
Re: your "creator beings", I think we cannot say for sure, but where is the evidence? It's an extraordinary claim with almost nothing backing it.
You make a point here:
> What’s the relationship between a Petri dish of bacteria and a person? Imagine a culture of penicillin reasoning how it came to be.
But the difference between ourselves and bacteria is that we can reason about things other than our immediate surroundings; and about magnitudes other than those we live in. If bacteria in a Petri dish developed intelligence, curiosity about the world, and some sort of scientific method, might they not discover there is a world outside their Petri dish? Maybe they would get many things wrong, but wouldn't they be able to indirectly determine at least some things about the wider universe (the lab!), even if they never get to meet us? And wouldn't they be able to develop some tools to finally observe the human beings in the lab, at least partially? And finally, wouldn't they be able to think "hey, these scientists are not the gods of the sacred Protozoan Book, they must be made of the same building blocks as we are!". We're talking intelligent bacteria who go to university and publish papers, mind you.
I don't think there is any evidence about the hypothesis that life is a single occurrence, like a basket woven by Travis Jungroth. It could still be true, but I think it's one of the least interesting starting points to think about the universe. It's somewhat like solipsism; maybe it's true, but it leads nowhere -- and we cannot tell, anyway.
It's a compelling idea but there is no evidence helping it.
For me, it's easier to take what we see in our own "lawn" and expand it outwards to the cosmos as a whole. A frog evolved from a single-cell as well as an elephant did, and the geological landscapes we see are the result of physics, time and random fluctuations. I apply that to every other galaxy and that's it.
Of course, one could think that single cell to be "planted" like a seed would be but no supporting evidence for now (or ever?).
No evidence helping it? Not a single thing that’s ever happened supports the idea that our current reality was constructed?
> For me, it's easier to take what we see in our own "lawn" and expand it outwards to the cosmos as a whole.
The uncomfortable thing about reality is that it’s often different from what is easier for us.
What you choose to expand out into the galaxy or even the entire universe is a critical choice. You could choose to extend the relationships between plants, or how power structures develop, or the explosion of complexity localized on Earth, or the human tendency to purposefully create environments for life.
> the geological landscapes we see are the result of physics, time and random fluctuations
Most of them. Not all of them. Bingham Canyon Mine is an open pit 4km wide and 1.2km deep. El Teniente mine is 3,000km of tunnels up to 2km deep. There’s Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam. There are artificial islands and nuclear test sites.
That’s all just in the last 150 years. Draw the trend of human progress and where does it end up a billion years from now?
That’s even just assuming the conditions that created the universe mirror the conditions here on Earth, which is a tremendous assumption. It might be like having a letter dropped through your door slot for the first time and reasoning the postal service is entirely made of paper folded and stuffed into other paper. The actual reality of mail carriers with pensions, trucks with antilock breaks and sorting machines bigger than any animal that has ever existed would be unfathomable. Anyone suggesting it would be easily dismissed in favor of a simpler and less correct explanation.
Mostly things that exist without other concrete explanations. Consciousness in humans and animals. A lack of contact with other intelligent life. The constants of the universe being such that the universe can exist at all and not do something like collapse on itself.
The common report of having met non-human entities, especially when on psychedelics.
Our own tendency to creat artificial worlds (farms, zoos) and simulations.
None of it proves anything or necessarily moves towards a constructed reality versus a specific alternative.
I understand you're not saying this is a proof of anything.
However, I have a hard time understanding the connection between those things you list and "... and therefore this may be evidence of a constructed universe."
I just don't see it. For example, things "without concrete explanations" are more easily chalked to our lack of understanding. Or even better, to the idea that there's no "why" to the universe, it just is; we can sometimes understand the "how" to some degree, if at all.
I think some emergent properties like consciousness and others are elegantly hypothesized about in Stephen Jay Gould's "The Panda's Thumb". Some things arise as secondary structures to other things which more readily relate to the environment. Like some hypothesize -- mind you, not interested in whether this specific hypothesis is right or wrong, just an example -- that walking upright/hip posture may have precipitated the evolution of mammalian brain cortex as a side effect!
I don't want to pick on or challenge your every sentence, because I understand this is just opinion and we're all entitled to it. But I really don't see where's the evidence for a constructed universe.
If there were highly advanced beings that constructed the universe, and designed it to obfuscate that very fact, what would evidence of that look like?
If they are perfect at hiding their hand, we wouldn't be able to tell.
But that kind of thinking is akin to solipsism, a mental dead end. What if you're the only real person and the rest is simulated or a dream? Would you be able to tell?
What if god left all those dinosaur fossils as a joke, and big dinos never really existed? Well, it's possible, but it's a thought-terminating idea, so best not considered.
But you’re the one doing the thought terminating. These things don’t have to be a dead-end.
What if it wasn’t perfectly obfuscated? Is there any evidence at all you’d consider to be in favor of the world being not as it first appears? Not something that’s way more easily explained otherwise, like fossils.
There are things that come to mind for me. One is the brain’s ability to experience hypergeometry and additional dimensions on psychedelics. I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone. I don’t think geometry scales in the way that running does, for example.
Similarly is are the many cases of people experiencing beings outside of consensus reality. People see people talking to them clear as day, that no one else sees. You can write this off as either a drug-induced hallucination or mental illness, but that’s deciding the cause a priori. It’s circular reasoning.
Without getting into the details of hallucinations and experiences you mention: how is anything of that even weak evidence of a constructed reality?
> I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone
Regardless, it's exactly how evolution works. Evolution allows for irrelevant and harmless traits with no purpose to exist. It even allows for somewhat harmful traits to exist, as long as they are balanced by a competitive advantage they piggyback on (e.g. what if hallucinations and listening to voices are a side effect of creativity and imagination?).
What would a constructed universe look like? I dunno. I would like to see contradicting evidence and timelines, maybe even obvious "coverups", maybe if a hyperadvanced civilization appeared across the whole globe (no secrecy) saying "hey it was us!" (but maybe they'd be lying, so who knows).
Skepticism is one of our most important tools. It tells us to triple check any extraordinary evidence and rule out all possible natural/ordinary explanations first.
You would have to pass a pretty high bar to consider a constructed universe... and remember, it would have to be strong evidence, because like you objected, "well God/Genuine faked all the fossils" is uninteresting.
Possibly timespans for interesting things to happen would be way shorter (compared to sentient animal lifespans). Less wasted time. Fewer deadends. No/fewer extinction events (possibly, or maybe our aliens designers like seeing stuff die or explode like with do playing SimCity?).
Things would make more obvious sense. There would be fewer contradictions. The purpose of life would be clearer, since it was designed. The physics and "rules" of the universe would have fewer special cases and would be easier to model. There would be no paradoxes. We would be able to explore the whole universe more easily.
I'm sure you can think of objections to each of my arguments, but really, some evidence would be there. Everything currently and firmly points the opposite way, except we don't know what happened before the Big Bang... but that's "pink invisible unicorns" stuff which I don't think we will be able to ever answer conclusively.
I suppose there could be a distinction, but that is the idea of God, and that is the rational foundation for God's existence in Abrahamic religions. Funny to think that scientific development could invoke faith in some ways.
I think it's not the same. Religions are usually not mainly about more powerful beings creating other beings. There's always a whole set of prescriptive rules, "this is how you're supposed to live your life" that doesn't apply here.
This is not a nitpick, it's actually the main thing about religion. Giving meaning and purpose to life. The hypothesis of some beings creating the rest of life in the universe doesn't provide this.
I’m specifically not invoking faith. This doesn’t support Abrahamic religions more than any other. The line of reasoning here applies just as much to Hinduism, simulation theory, many creation stories, zoo theory, etc.
The idea that the universe was created by a higher being applies to every religion, but does not invoke faith? If you were to believe that theory at all it would require faith. How else could you believe it? No matter what you call it, there is a leap of faith.
Just to make sure we're on the same page, here's the definition of faith from Merriam Webster that I think applies:
a(1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God
(2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion
b(1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof
(2): complete trust
The first thing is you don't have to "believe" in the idea I outlined to use it. It's just a condition under which a probabilistic explanation doesn't account for the lack of observed intelligent life. And, it hasn't been disproven. So that's a way any probabilistic model is incomplete.
Second, we could come to seriously believe in this theory through consensus direct interactions with these higher powers. That wouldn't require a leap of faith at all. If robots showed up and were like "we were sent by your creators, they say you're doing great" and gave us a second moon as a present, that would be very strong proof of more powerful beings.
Yes, if we had direct contact with the higher being that created our universe, or any proof of their existence, humans would no longer require faith regarding the existence of God...
How would you use this theory if you didn't believe it held any truth? You certainly can't draw any corollaries from it. If it is actually a relevant condition worth considering, then you must believe it to be tenable to some degree.
There's a condition where when I kick a ball, just before I touch it, the ball actually invisibly flies to the moon and back and then moves forward. It would be a condition under which Newton's laws fail... but I would have to actually believe in that condition to some degree to use it. It is also similarly unfalsifiable. With current observations it is scientifically untenable, and believing in that condition would require faith.
Any model can be proven incomplete if you conjure up unfalsifiable conditions that exist outside its domain and believe in them.
> b(1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof
For you to use the theory of creation in any meaningful way you must believe it is tenable. For you to believe it is tenable, without being faithful, there must be proof. Proof of this existence comes in many forms, where is your proof? Morality? Reason? Those aren't entirely scientific proofs...
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to censure or disprove creationism and the metaphysical systems built upon it, they are very important and super interesting... but I don't think any of them are without a bit of faith, and they are certainly beyond science's capabilities. This is why I was saying it was interesting that science could invoke faith in some way.
First of all: the question needs to be qualified by what we mean by "out there". The galaxy? The observable universe? The entire universe?
The universe might be infinite, in which case: yes, there is life out there. We know the probably of life forming on any given planet must be greater than zero, or else we wouldn't be here. From this we can deduce the average volume which contains exactly one planet with life, which must be finite. Whether it makes sense to talk about what could be happening beyond the cosmological event horizon is another discussion.
If we are talking about the observable universe or an even smaller volume: How can you say it's statistically implausible without knowing the probability of life forming on any given planet? It might be incredibly small, yet greater than zero. Your line of reasoning is incredibly common but I can't help but feel like it's mainly driven by wishful thinking.
Probably extrapolating from the fact that life here on Earth being found in harsh conditions, and those conditions being likely to be found all over the universe.
