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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

There are a number of flaws with this argument, but one major obvious one is the idea that finding life on mars would show the probability of life generating on a random planet is high. The premise of this argument relies on assuming life arising on Earth and Mars are stochastic processes that each occurred independently; on the contrary, there could be shared featured of Earth and Mars that make life more probable on those two planets than elsewhere.

The 'great filter' could be shared between the two planets.

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Finding life on Mars, or anywhere in the solar system, would be huge and would radically improve our ability to predict life elsewhere. If it's chemically different from earth life, that would revolutionize our knowledge of complex chemistries. If Mars life is chemically similar but independent of earth life, that would suggest that life tends to use common chemistry. If life on earth and mars has a common origin, that would tell us a lot about the early solar system. In short, N=2 doesn't sound great, but it is lightyears better than N=1.

Earth and Mars are also close enough to have seeded each other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite

Given the amount of waterbears and the fact that they are small enough to get blown off the top of the atmosphere by solar winds, I suspect that perhaps one waterbear per century has the conditions to briefly wake up on Mars and wonder what the hell is going on before dying.

Considering that they can survive the vacuum of space, 1000 times more radiation than other animals, few days at -200C (30 years at -20C), and they can be dehydrated for 10 years, i'd say they'd probably briefly wake up, wonder what the hell is going on, then doze off in a 30+ year hibernation state.

It's about as meaningful as asking 9 people in the same, small, rural town if they like going to the library, then concluding that x/10 people, in general, like going to the library. Maybe that particular town has a really shitty library.

Or a really good one.

Or, maybe 9 just isn't enough to get an idea of the other 900,000,000,000,000,000,000... planets.

I like reading, but i hate libraries (as in physical buildings), at least in the western countries. With almost everyone having internet access, there's no point. Digitize everything, put it online.

I hate sports, but I don't argue there's no point to them because there's no point to them for me.

A library's advantage isn't just "musty old books" books (some young people, myself included, love physical books and have small apartments!). It's also a free, public space you can come to just be. If you're a kid who has no spending money, you can come to do your homework, or code. Especially relevant for kids who have a poor learning environment at home (too many siblings, parents fighting, etc.)

Thanks for sharing your opinion I guess?

Are you currently in charge of the UK government, by any chance? I only ask, because presumably someone has to be and it doesn't look like it is the people on the telly.

Depending on the result, it could tell you a lot more about libraries than no result. For example if a large proportion do use the library, that's not necessarily evidence of high library use generally, but it does show that high library use is possible and that libraries are used in some places at all, where before you might not have known either of those things.

Furthermore even if life on Mars was seeded from earth, it tells us that seeding between planets is possible and therefore likely occurs in at least some other solar systems.

See the German Tank Problem. Even a sample of one tank is vastly better than no tanks, and even two tanks can be a surprisingly useful data set.

> The premise of this argument relies on assuming life arising on Earth and Mars are stochastic processes that each occurred independently

That isn't the premise. It's the premise of how it got there for a straightforward example, but doesn't avert the filter questions (regardless of how it got there).

I think you are on to something about shared dependencies, but have trouble thinking about the impact of these might be. They share more similar cosmic positions in the galaxy, perhaps have more similar chemical compositions, they both share the same sun. Is that enough?

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