tl;dr: "Because it means life is not incredibly unlikely (after all, it occurred on two planets in our own solar system); ergo what must instead be incredibly unlikely is the ability for life to progress to the point where it can spread across the galaxy (after all, no other life form has contacted us); ergo we are doomed."
I feel like I'm playing into a cliche by even giving this response, but:
Would we recognize it? Would we even know that it had happened? Consider that if there is a civilization capable of traveling across inter-stellar distances, they very likely have got a very different sort of life-span that people on earth. Because of this, their language (if they have something we would recognize as language) could be dramatically different than ours.
Honestly their brains, or "mechanism of creativity" as I guess you could call it, could be something that we would never be able to communicate with.
There are biochemical reasons why extra-terrestrial life would probably be similar to ours, but I can think of no reason why they would be neurologically or psychologically anything like us.
Think about the ants again. Ants have communications, sure, but it's not language, at least not in the human sense. Ants very probably don't have thoughts, and because they don't have thoughts, they don't have a reason to abstract them to words.
This hasn't prevented ants (or bees) from building incredibly interesting and complicated physical and organizational structures.
We've contacted bees. Do you suppose that they realize it?
What if interstellar travel is just really hard (= no advanced life form has figured it out, and it might just be impossible/not economical), and whatever signals their civilizations generate just aren't strong enough to be picked up by e.g. SETI?
It wouldn't spell "doom" unless you count the sun running out of juice/going supernova. The universe might be packed with life, each such patch effectively isolated to it's own little corner.
It's even beyond that. Learning to write software it seems that some solutions are too involved to even begin to try to explain, so they might not find us uninteresting, they are just lost in thought.
Someone should go back in time and tell the Goths that before they make contact with the Romans. Also the Mongolians should have been told to leave China alone.
The comparison does not really hold: you would be hard pressed to find a single first point of contact between Goths and the Roman Empire or Mongolians and China.
In both cases, fighting had been going on for centuries before the empires were finally toppled. Thus even if overall less advanced, the "barbarians" had comparable warfare technology.
In most known cases where a true first encounter event occured - such as Columbus arrival in Hispaniola, Pizarro in Peru or Cook in Australia - the less advanced civilization was indeed overrun if not exterminated by the more advanced one.
In the words of Iain M. Banks, the kind of problem "most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
"two planets"? Is he is writing from the perspective of a future event of life being discovered on another planet besides Earth, or is there some underground news about life being discovered on another planet besides Earth?
A bit far-fetched, but it could also mean we are the first. If there were/are sufficiently advanced civilizations in the past that could engineer on the scale of star systems or above (singularity hypothesis), there would be a certain probability that we would detect that (so far or in the future), no?
That's a bullshit argument. If we find life very close to us, it's very likely there is a common origin, and this gives us no information on the Great Filter.
1. If we find life very close to us, that does indeed increase the probability of the panspermia hypothesis.
2. The probability of panspermia will still not be 1, or even approaching 1. That leaves enough room to avoid "bullshit argument" in favor of "questionable argument," which is a caveat Bostrom (and Hanson, in his Great Filter) would happily agree to.
3. Even if single-origin life has seeded multiple planets, if the seeding occurred far enough in the past and widely enough, that still leaves us with an anthropic filter problem.
I'm not seeing the "widely enough" in this case. Finding life on the one moon in the solar system that could support it, specifically finding life that is organic, would very much suggest single origin. The original Hanson paper sounded almost like it was actively avoiding that possibility. Thus my impulse to state it more strongly than is strictly necessary. Finding life close to us may increase P(panspermic hypothesis), but it increases P(common origin) more, and this ratio diminishes as we find life further and further away.
I keep seeing stories pop up here that NASA has some upcoming announcement, but I never remember to follow up on the announcement day to find out what the hubbub was about. I'm starting to get annoyed that a government agency thinks it needs to save "the big reveal" for a press conference. Why not just make the announcement?
That’s the contrarianism you are going to pick? A bunch of scientists having a for the general public probably harmless but for the scientists in the field no doubt somewhat exciting announcement?
You are not the target audience. This is a press release. Before the existence of the web you would have never heard about the announcement unless you are a science journalist. (The vast majority of people will never hear about this announcement. Reading HN or other places where this announcement might conceivably pop up is clearly not normal.) You really shouldn’t be annoyed about something that is not even directed at you.
Though I am curious: why are they announcing this via a press conference? It seems as though they would publish a paper to be peer-reviewed or something first.
The past track record though on these things seems to indicate though that these press conferences fall more into the very interesting discovery for scientists and those who follow it, rather than ground breaking discovery that hits the front pages in general publications.
Although saying that if something truly ground breaking were discovered it wouldn't surprise me if it were announced in the same way.
> It seems as though they would publish a paper to be peer-reviewed or something first
They did. The link mentions that it is under embargo until the time of the conference. It says "Science Journal" so I'm guessing that is an odd way of referring to the journal Science.
The italics are a bit off to me. Maybe they meant "Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 11 a.m. PST On Dec. 2"
Considering Streptococcus mitis already survived a period of 3 years on the Moon, and amino acids were found in soil retrieved by the Apollo astronauts, my hopes are high.
Does it matter? Most significant discoveries have little (if any) impact on the average person's life. The importance of many discoveries can take decades to become apparent, and are little-understood when they are discovered. And if that doesn't matter, sometimes just knowing something instead of not knowing it is reason enough to be excited by it.
And if nothing else, it helps to close a gap (well... turn a big one into two smaller ones) for those who like to make leaps of faith between points of understanding instead of looking for answers in the middle.
wow, I didnt get how 33 people blindly agree and upvote a one-word answer, offering no perspective at all , to a very valid question on how a successful outcome to SETI would influence an average guy's life!!
Surely, this is not a open-and-shut question.
Let me dampen some spirits who are gleefully waiting to see breaking news of extra-terrestrial life.
Think about the budget and investment into this grand objective.Think whether the money invested has/would have a respectable ROI-would it have been better spent on less-glamorous, but more useful ventures like funding projects with more "tangible benefits, and issues", like OLPC. Think of world hunger,lack of access to drinking water. Not glamorous-but plenty of scope to advance technology to change the world we live in. And then think of romanticizing on "Are we alone" , la Jodie Foster,Contact or NASA news conferences.
Think of the many other colossal wastes of money. I contemplated more than "yes" but really? "Yes" says enough. The discovery of extraterrestrial life will change my life, and for the better, and who the hell are you to denigrate that? How much money does the world spend on bubble gum? How much money has already been spent tearing Iraq and Afghanistan to smaller pieces this morning? How much money was spent on ad buys on last year's Superbowl?
The world has heaping piles of money. Some minuscule fraction is spent on basic science, and you're all high and mighty about lack of access to drinking water. Give me a break.
You want perspective? It's all around you. If you need it from a one-word answer that succinctly responded to the original question, then I'm afraid you need to look elsewhere.
Hey,I didn't mean to denigrate you, or anything like that. If it sounded that way, I am very sorry.
The examples that you quote citing colossal wastage of expenditure, ring quite true.Exactly my point. But really, wasted expenditure is wasted expenditure,plain and simple- There cant be any justification, more so, citing another wasted expenditure. Analogy- how rational would it sound, if a convicted murder says in trial "But I killed just one guy.Go,look at some war-ravaged place in Africa what people get away with".
Actually,I believe basic science encompasses a lot more than astrobiology-Even the issues I pointed out, would stand to gain a lot,from advances in basic sciences, and perhaps need more investment.
Perhaps you feel that discovery of ET life would changed your life for the good- I would completely agree with you, if it could make us humans healthier,welathier, or otherwise more intelligent. Till then, I would wait and watch :-) and... read the next interesting thread on HN!
My guess at the reason for the upvotes is that amichael's question was not at all novel, and most people have already decided which way they stand on it; so they upvoted to express agreement.
There are no doubt higher roi projects currently in the works as well. Perhaps the money devoted to this type of research could be better spent, but then, when I consider how much money human beings waste each year on football, a hearty "yes" seems entirely appropriate. My life will be changed a great deal more by whatever they announce than by who wins the superbowl.
An incredibly huge one. If they've found microbal life reasonably close by, then atleast on a personal level, I'd think the possibility of intelligent extraterrestial life can be taken MUCH more seriously.
That said, I'd think it'll be much less spectacular, possibly yet another condition added to the pre-requisites required for life.
Considering your existence, that possibility should already be taken seriously.
What's interesting though, is that if they actually find evidence for microbial life on another planet far away, then it's mighty likely that said planet already has far more complex life on it (taking into account the time it takes for light to travel through space, we'd be viewing outdated information).
A lot of people are simply curious, and like to increase their understanding of the world/universe we live in.
Do you only care about things that directly and immediately impact your life? Why are you on a news site at all?
Perhaps they've sussed out something about what we should expect to see in extraterrestrial life at the molecular (e.g. DNA) level. The biggest clue is the list of participants. One of them specializes in research on non-standard biology. I'm guessing the announcement will be something along the lines of, "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it", and it's right here on Earth!
Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing: http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
tl;dr: "Because it means life is not incredibly unlikely (after all, it occurred on two planets in our own solar system); ergo what must instead be incredibly unlikely is the ability for life to progress to the point where it can spread across the galaxy (after all, no other life form has contacted us); ergo we are doomed."