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Comment by lubujackson | Hacker News Reader

It's the "I don't want to say aliens because no one will listen to you if you say aliens" conundrum, which does a disservice to the science by pooh-poohing any intelligence-spawned possibilities while wildly speculating on naturally-caused possibilities.

The reality is this is an extremely alien object, no matter if it was formed by intelligent beings or spun off from a star. Maybe this is a solar sail or maybe it is a giant snowflake.

And, contrary to the author's hand-waving, there is nothing that says an enormous, impossibly thin solar sail can't be formed by randomly bashing an infinity of rocks together over a near-infinity of time - after all, LIFE ITSELF comes from just such an action, so pretty much anything is in play if that is the standard!

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> here is nothing that says an enormous, impossibly thin solar sail can't be formed by randomly bashing an infinity of rocks together over a near-infinity of time

Nobody is saying that it is impossible, the author is simply saying that it seems unlikely that is the origin. It's Occam's razor, whereby the simplest solution seems to not be alien intelligence or serendipitous solar sails, but rather something that we have seen appear naturally (fractals).

> after all, LIFE ITSELF comes from just such an action, so pretty much anything is in play if that is the standard!

That's how an instance of life came about. A very simple, most likely extremely short-lived, not at all efficient form of life. The advancement to Eukaryotes took ~2 billion years from there, and multicellular life took about another billion years. These happened not by random bashing, but selection pressures.

While a solar sail could happen completely randomly, 'life itself' isn't really a good comparison, since that's not really how it happened. At least not any form of life that is really recognizable as life.

everything is randomly bashing things together; every human is randomly bashing things together. we are similar, but have billions and billions of tiny differences that make up the specific things about us.

everything has selection pressures too: just like life forms exist and thrive in different environments, dust behaves differently at different temperatures and gravities.

life as an event, and specific things that happen thereafter are no less “random” than specific chunks of rock/dust in specific configurations

> life as an event, and specific things that happen thereafter are no less “random” than specific chunks of rock/dust in specific configurations

No. Incremental changes over millions of generations in response to environmental pressures are not "random".

This sliver of dusty ice may have formed in a one-in-a-million random chance, but there's no process that selects for this.

Life is a pretty rare occurrence, as far as we're aware. So I think I can forgive the author for not being sold on the "aliens" conclusion just yet–it's probably a good idea to look for alternative conclusions that might be more likely first.

>Life is a pretty rare occurrence, as far as we're aware.

I don't know where you get this from...just because we have not observed it directly? Based on everything we have learned so far about life here on Earth, it seems entirely reasonable to think that life would be very common throughout the universe.

If our nearby system (star, planets, and all in between) is to serve as an observation parameter to determine the probability of the occurrence of life, life in not very common.

Yes, it is true that you have plenty of life here, but you have it only on a very (and I mean very) thin layer on this floating rock. It seems a lot on the surface (pun intended), but it actually isn't.

It's reasonable to think life is very common. It's also reasonable to think that life might be very rare in the universe, or that we could be alone. Science, so far, hasn't really narrowed down orders of magnitude on some of the potential Great Filters. So it doesn't have that much to say about this question, yet.

(And, if you are willing to invoke some form of the anthropic principle, maybe a universe that can support even one instance of intelligent life is itself incredibly rare in some landscape?)

Something being reasonable to think (while it's also reasonable to think the opposite, no less) and being aware that something is a fact are two very different things.

Are you conflating "common" with "possible"? Study of exonoplanets finds earth-like ones relatively rare, and being Earth-like is still a far cry from.

There may be a large number of life-hposting planets in the Universe, while still fitting current data that they are extremely rare as a fraction of, for example, the region of space reachable by humans, by floating space rocks, or perhaps even the Earth's light-cone.