The majority of those planets are unsuited to anything we can imagine being alive, or only suitable for very simple unicellular life. Most of those plants are gas giants, or blazing hot gas giants. Some are rocky, but many of those are in orbits like Mercury, which would alternately bake and freeze them. Of course, part of the reason for this might be our detection methods, but as of now, we’re not finding. I hope like Earth, Venus, or Mars, while we find a lot of Jupiter’s. Maybe we’ll disocver that something like bacteria is ubiquitous, but that doesn’t imply much for our prospects of finding intelligent life. For all that we know life is common, but multicellular life is incredibly rare, or maybe it isn’t rare, but intelligent life is.
There are billions of galaxies though, so even if we are the only planet out of billions in our galaxy with complex life, there could still be billions of civilizations out there!
For that matter, the typical planet with life could be too large and have too thick an atmosphere for space travel or astronomy and thus never have any idea the rest of the universe exists. That wouldn't necessarily mean life was limited to single cells.
Just about "alternately bake and freeze" (no opinion on the rest):
Mercury does spin (slowly, every 60 earth days; previously was thought to be tidally locked), but on the other hand it's not tilted with respect to the "ecliptic plane" (the plane in which the planets orbit around the sun). It turns out it has water ice at the poles: https://www.space.com/18687-water-ice-messenger-discovery.ht...
About how we may expect life to be more prevalent than it is because our own existence is so miraculous. Though the other side is - if the universe is so large, with so many planets, then there may be a chance that there's life out there that's just as incredibly lucky as us.
I've always liked to entertain the idea that highly advanced intelligent life is an evolutionary dead-end. After all if human beings drive themselves to extinction in the next 10,000 or 50,000 years what did our intelligence get us? It didn't enable us to survive better than other species.
And what if a lot of intelligent species run into this problem? Where the level of knowledge and power they amass far outstrips what they've evolved to responsibly handle. And the result is intelligent species often manage to destroy themselves before they become wise enough to avoid that.
I constantly hear people saying we're going to make ourselves extinct, but have you ever stopped to think about how hard that is?
We're the most adaptable species ever to live on this planet . There are 8 billion of us on every continent except Antarctica, and we've found ways to codify and share our collective knowledge.
Climate disasters, widespread thermonuclear wars, etc would be horrifying and would likely kill a great many or even a majority of humans. But even that wouldn't do much more than slow us down a few hundred years.
Even an a massive impact from space on the scale of the Chicxulub impact would kill off most people, and collapse civilization - but we'd rise again in less than a thousand years.
It's very hard to think of a scenario that would actually end us. One thing I've speculated about is maybe we unlock some awful power that we can't control. For example, if it were easy for anybody to distill antimatter in their garage in large quantities. Because there are always going to be those among us who want to burn it all down and who would destroy everything if they could. In a hypothetical world where terrorists and rampagers attacked with kilograms of antimatter, that might make it difficult to maintain a level of civilization for long periods of time.
> but we'd rise again in less than a thousand years.
Would we though? I am not so sure starting from scratch is going to possible. For example, all the easy oil is gone. All the easy mining, is gone. We can get at it because we have the technology.
If 99% of the human species was wiped out, yes we would continue to exist, but I would not expect many great civilisations to flourish again
The bit about energy sources is true, though a little spun. It's true that oil is gone. Coal is still plentiful, even at the surface. And the "hole" in industrial development where we depended on oil specifically has been less than 100 years or so, and already seems to be reaching its end. It's not impossible to imagine a future society skipping liquid fuels (and most of aviation) and still making its way to the renewable revolution.
> All the easy mining, is gone.
This bit is wrong, though. You can literally walk through a demolition site and pick up rebar and aluminum by the ton. Access to a single ancient reactor would give you the equivalent of decades of mining from any single uranium site. All our city building has had the effect of concentrating easily exploitable "ore" resources, not depleting them.
I was probably over generalising (and I really have no idea about this tbh). But I would still think a lot of the easy mining is gone.
>Access to a single ancient reactor would give you the equivalent of decades of mining from any single uranium site
What could is uranium to destroyed civilisation where all previous knowledge has been lost? I don't think future post civilisation peoples are going to be reconstructing a nuclear reactor from wood.
>You can literally walk through a demolition site and pick up rebar and aluminum by the ton
Post civilisation people are not going to have much use for demolished materials. Yes with modern technology we could reuse it. But how will they use it? I've seen a build demolished in the third world. People came and got the pieces of rebar true, hammered the concrete off it, but only to sell, not to use. I don't really think in a post civ world it would be of much use
> It's not impossible to imagine a future society skipping liquid fuels (and most of aviation) and still making its way to the renewable revolution.
Impossible? Perhaps not, but still very very unlikely. For decades after the event, survival will be all encompassing. Knowledge will pretty much have disappeared. You talk about skipping liquid fuels and aviation and going straight to renewables. First people will need to invent electricity again - everything will need to be "invented" again from a much weaker starting point. I just don't see it happening. Much more probable it is the end of human civilisations / humans as the dominant species on this planet
> But I would still think a lot of the easy mining is gone.
Again, you have completely lost me. Can you explain again why you think it's easier to dig up and smelt natural iron ores (or copper, or whatever) than it is to find an old rusty engine block or electric motor and just use that? Civilization needs metal to develop, in this example, not "mining". And ours has already done the mining!
We don't need mining - The metal in junk yards and recycling centres are a lot easier to access than building a mine in the middle of nowhere going underground 50 to 100 metres. The only reason we do mine and need new metal is because metal from junkyards and recycling centres are needed as well, and all existing metal is already being used. If most humans die off then the existing metal are available for reuse. And it's as easy as heating it up past melting point and molding it into the right shape; There might be ways to do that optimally but in the case where plentiful resources are available compared to human capital, it should suffice.
The oil is gone, but coal is still easy to access. We can bootstrap off a second coal industrial revolution. And every person who've been through high school knows the principles involved in generating power from coal, though might be lacking in the actual techniques.
> but only to sell, not to use
You've proved there's buyers who would find a use for it.
> You've proved there's buyers who would find a use for it.
You seem to be falling into the romantic view of post apocalyptic event. The world doesn't stay the same as it is now, just with the people gone. There is no one to buy your scrap metal. There is no more organisation, there is no more nothing.
> And every person who've been through high school knows the principles involved in generating power from coal
No they don't. They may know coal can be involved, but they have no idea how to take coal and make electricity. I assume you are a technical person working in a technical role. Go to your local supermarket and ask the person at the till for the basic principles involved.
If they just graduated high school they’d remember their science classes. The coal burns, it generates steam which rotates some magnets and produces a current. If they’re fresh high school grads they might even have the textbook at home still.
The maker culture contradicts your hypothesis. I have a friend who has for decades run his own little metal furnaces. By comparison to the modern industrial refining processes, his are primitive. But they are easily built and work well for the individual.
There is plenty of information available today that allows one to rebuild some level of technology very quickly.
> There is plenty of information available today
Last time I looked today, we were not in a post civilisation world. This information will be gone. How is information going to survive an event that wipes out 99% of humanity? No power no rule of law. The sole concern of the remaining people is to get food and get to an environment they can eek out an existence. The information of today will be all but gone.
> I have a friend who has for decades run his own little metal furnaces. By comparison to the modern industrial refining processes, his are primitive. But they are easily built and work well for the individual.
Sure, but how many people have this knowledge now? How many people will be left with this knowledge after:
a) the event itself
b) after years of struggling to survive and finally being able to more than subsist
First priority food and shelter. Food, you can scavenge supermarkets, but eventually it will run out. You will need to grow your food by hand. You will need to find seed and be successful otherwise it is hunter gatherer lifestyle, with assumed hunting is minimal as whatever wiped out 99% of humanity did the same to other animal species.
But lets say you found a good piece of land where you could survive, it would take years. Lets suppose you were one of the few people who knew how to build a furnace. Are you going to leave your patch of land to go wondering in the remnants of what was left of the city to get some scrap metal to carry back? I don't see it happening. Then in a generation of what was was is forgotton
The knowledge won't all die with us. And we will be quick to reverse engineer and reinvent things again. We don't need oil, we've got coal, hydro, wind, and solar (both concentrated solar and solar panels), and we have biofuels. With most humans dead, arable land won't be in short supply.
> It's got nothing to do with how long a species has been around.
If you are talking about species to "ever live on this planet", then how long a species has been around being a pretty big factor in determining how adaptable a species is.
And in that regard, homo sapiens is rather a newcomer. Even our ancestors have only been around for a meager six million years.
While other species, many of them oceanic, have been around for hundreds of millions of years like sponges (580 million years) Jelly Fish (550 million years). Cyanobacterias are actually the oldest known living system in the world, originating 2.8 billion years ago, technically the oldest life on earth.
Compared to those, humanities existence is literally just a second on the clock of Earths history.
I think "intelligent" is perhaps the wrong adjective to distinguish humans. I would suggest "social" is a better one, as we are to other primates what ants or bees are to nonsocial insects. It's not the intelligence of the individual so much as the "programmability". Thus, I doubt it's an evolutionary dead end, as when you look at social organization from a broader view, it's developed in many different species. Even multicellular life itself seems like social organization at a lower, earlier level of abstraction.
I would agree that an interplanetary/interstellar civilization is something that may never come to pass, but I don't see it as a judgement on the capacity of particular life on earth to adapt, but rather a result of the physical laws that constrain all life, particularly delta-V and the speed of light.
It's interesting how insightful, thoughtful comments like this get modded down to hell on HN because they offend someone's religious beliefs. You're right, all evidence so far does point to us driving ourselves to extinction eventually, and the way things are going, it's likely to be a lot less than 10k years. And the idea of other intelligent species running into this problem isn't a new idea, it's long been a theory among searchers of extraterrestrial life, called the "great filter theory".
The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background. Yet these themes frequently crop up among those who are making a point of the inferiority of religious thought. I have a certain distaste for how much people apparently love to think in terms of labels rather than substance.
>The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background.
Really? I haven't seen that at all. If you're talking about Christianity and the whole "end times" stuff, that's a little different: that isn't humanity "driving itself to extinction", that's some deity deciding that humans are bad and proactively eliminating them. I don't see that as the same thing at all.
In fact, why I said this seemed to be offending peoples' religious ideals is that I think the idea of humans making themselves extinct directly counters this religious idea that a deity is the one in charge of humans' fate. To them, if humans are all eliminated, it can't possibly be because humans did it to themselves (as this is what they'd call a "humanistic" or "secular" idea), but could only happen because their deity made it so. And conversely, as long as humans are "good" enough (meaning they worship the deity enough, nothing about them wrecking their environment or obliterating themselves with nuclear weapons) then the deity will protect them from their own mistakes.
"Humanity" as an entity with purpose or a mind is substantively the same as a deity from my perspective.
It's an abstract concept that is analogous to a single human, that is supposed to exist without a specific location in space and time, and has free will, causes things to happen and/or is blamed for them. And I see the same lack of empirical evidence for the concept.
So, yes, you may not see it as the same thing, but I quite definitely do.
Are you arguing? I only mentioned life, not degrees of complexity of life.
Ponder this: how early did life appear on Earth? what later cataclysmic events did it survive through the next several billions of years? how many living organisms are there on Earth at the moment?
Finally, how you imagine life can exist or can appear is not equivalent to the facts of life on Earth, let alone in the entire Universe.
Red supergiants are necessarily no more than about 25 million years old; they keep ejecting a lot of material, forming nebulae; and then they end as supernovae. So, unlikely to have sufficient time and relative calm to form and maintain planets.
