Drake on Drake: ET Life A Certainty

astro writes "Frank Drake, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute applies Occam's Razor to his own Drake equation: 'Life should appear very frequently on other Earth-like planets. There will be microbial life nearby the solar system.' The simplest scenario is that 'Not Life' has a nearly identical number of assumptions as 'Life.' The contrasting view is that experimentation can prove it--but how many times did life independently create itself while the Earth changed through the whole spectrum of what biological forces might conjure up elsewhere. A sample size of 1 is in fact an experimental sample size of many--just here during Earth's climatic history."

Comments

How can this view be proved or disproved?

[taloobie]

The assumptions presented in the article cannot be proved or disproved. What does it help us to state "Not Life has as much chance as life" or "Consider our existence as proof".

Although I tend to believe there is intelligent life in the universe outside of Earth, I'm not sure this argument serves as proof or even a good starting point for a proof.

I think we ought to just be content saying there might be a chance that other intelligent life exists and we'll get to proving it through empirical data. Then if everything checks out we can go applying theory, probability, and predictions. Until then, this stuff is simply philosophy - the earth was flat until we found out it was not.

well.

[pieces of poo]

If you play it by the numbers, then yes, life should occur frequently. By even the paltry data we've already collected, life should be abundant and soon even reachable.

This has a unintended but frightening implication, however.

Humans have existed as a sapient, technological species for approximately 30000 years (and that's generous, really). That means that in the cosmic equivalent of a the beginnings of a heartbeat, we've gone from caves to extraplanetary exploration, and our technology curve will only accelerate from here on out.

Considering that it took almost no time to get here, it will take even less time to get to point where we would be leapfrogging across the galaxy, colonizing everywhere. Within the next 30,000 years we'll have had more than enough time to have distributed explorers to every inhabitable/explorable planet in the galaxy.

The question, then, is why hasn't anyone found Earth yet, if the probability for life is so high? Either every civilization gets wiped out long before they can begin galactic exploration (without exception--a pretty difficult thing to imagine, unless you're an apocalyptic environmentalist), or, perhaps more frightening in an indirect sense, there simply aren't any other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy.

You'd think that even if ancient astronauts had found Earth, we would have uncovered at least SOME sort of artifact. After all, playing the probabilities, if one civilization found us, it would be overwhelmingly likely that many, many others would be able to, and would. So far we've got nothing.

It's a difficult reality to accept, but it may very well be that we're alone in the galaxy, and perhaps even in the universe.

Re:well.

[sconeu]

Congratulations! You've just described Fermi's Paradox.

another possibility

[Indy1]

That either FTL (faster then Light) travel is utterly impossibly, or that civilations that discover FTL are few and far between.

Timing

[Michael Woodhams]

We have a sample size of only one, and that this sample resulted in intelligent life is a given (else we wouldn't be here to make observations on it.) We do however have some timing information. From this we see:

1) Life evolved on Earth pretty much as soon as conditions were stable enough to allow it. This suggests that bacterial life is highly likely.

2) It took at least hundreds of millions of years to develop Eukariotic life (big cells with a nucleus, such as we are made of, as opposed to bacteria.) This means that this step might be rare.

3) It took about 3 billion years to evolve differentiated multicellular life. This means that this step could be exceedingly rare.

4) Multicellular life evolved into a vast array of designs in a just a few million years (the 'Cambrian explosion'.) This means that once multicellular life starts, it will quickly produce complex forms.

5) From the Cambrian explosion to us is something like 500 million years. This is an intermediate time scale that makes it hard to judge how likely intelligent life is.

Disclaimer: I'm not 100% sure of some of the timescales above. It is all from memory.

Disclaimer 2: The Edicara fauna complicate the picture above on the origin of multicellular life, depending on how you interpret them.

Disclaimer 3: All the above is merely probabilistic. E.g. if the evolution of bacterial life is very rare, there is still a 5% chance that it will have occurred during the first 5% of the available time. Therefore we can't strongly exclude the possiblity that the evolution of bacterial life is hard.

Two schools of thought.

[Restil]

When it comes to Drake related wonderings.

There's the thought that its almost an absolute certainty that intellegent life has evolved elsewhere, and probably in vast numbers of individual civilizations.

On the other hand, the theory goes that within a few hundred years, we'll have the ability to (and therefore probably will) send generation ships to other solar systems. If we are to assume that 500 years after each colony is settled, it launches its own generation ship to the next solar system, the entire galaxy could be colonized in a matter of a few million years. This is of course assuming that most of the colonies don't manage to kill themselves off.

The point being, since a few million years is a cosmic blink of the eye, if any intellegent life DID exist, either it should be everywhere already, or all previous incarnations have wiped themselves out before they've had a chance to travel beyond their home world. Either that, or they're leaving us alone. After all, we ARE rather far away from anything. Its possible that a 4.3 lightyear stretch is too far to consider useful. And its also possible that we're the result of such a colonization project and everyone forgot about it, or were dumped here without knowing to begin with. Or maybe they knew and simply never passed it on. Its not like a lot of folklore has lasted for 30K years.

So, to recap this rant. Assuming there IS intellegent life, its already everywhere it wants to be, and either we're a part of it, or it's decided to completely leave us alone.

-Restil