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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

My working hypothesis is that the galaxy (if not at least the solar system) is teeming with rocks containing Protozoa that are ready to colonise any planet with the right conditions (in a matter of thousands of years after the conditions are right) the moment they are ready. Perfectly explains everything we see and honestly would not be surprising at all.

We need to start developing meaningful working hypotheses and make judgement calls instead of waiting till we have definitive proof. This was similar to how basically no one was surprised that every star out there has planets around it yet we were writing sci-fi under that assumptions for basically a century before definitive proof.

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It's an interesting theory but I feel like it doesn't reflect the reality. If galaxy was indeed teeming with rocks containing some sort of microbes than where did they all come from? It'll take an enormous amount of effort to populate an enormous amount of rocks and scatter them across the galaxy. I wouldn't presume that Protozoa would appear on asteroids just by itself. For this mechanism to work there would have to be millions or even billions of such rocks for every star system to ensure that at least a couple of them land on a ripe planet and some of the microbes survive the impact. Most of these rocks would end up falling into a star or a massive gas giant. And we have to think in terms of billions of years here. So these populated asteroids would have to keep falling on a potential life-supporting planet for a couple billions of years until it indeed become habitable.

Ok, even if this mechanism of fertilizing planets was indeed functional as you suggest, we still don't see any evidence of intelligent life out there in our galaxy. Surely, out of billions of planets and billions of years time there would emerge at least a couple of civilizations capable of colonizing a significant part of our galaxy. There's certainly a slim possibility that we may be the first of such civilizations, but I'd be surprised to find out that humanity is THE smartest and most reasonable civilization out of billions others that our galaxy was capable to produce so far.

Well I’m unfortunately digging even deeper into my unproven conjecture well but I do have a working hypothesis for the lack of intelligent life - it’s actually really hard to develop intelligence in the human sense. It looks like there are a lot of extremely intelligent creatures even here (parakeets dolphins elephants) which can’t do shit because they lack thumbs and a peoper larynx so it’s possible the real great filter is what Id like to call actionable intelligence where you are smart and are able to apply and communicate this.

Another possibility is that the window in which life following similar intelligence trajectory as us will actually broadcast in measurable frequencies for a short while (centuries) before rapidly moving on to the next phase of their evolution (who knows what it is? Star child? Transcendence? Warp dimension) so we only have thin shells of radio waves expanding from each planet that developed intelligence making it impossible to detect.

Wow, that's... actually pretty sensical. The science part of me rejects it for having no evidence. But the pragmatic part of me would put its money underneath the theory. The reason

The bigger question is: how did the first Protozoa form? The usual primordial soup theory of random chance?

One good thing about this theory is that if there are 10^7 habitable planets at any given moment, each of them are "trying to produce life." So the chance that life gets to Earth increases multiple fold.

One problem for this theory is that if it takes a thousand years for Earth to get protozoa from another planet, then we would expect to have gotten multiple different types of Protozoa. But there is basically no variety on Earth: it's all carbon, and 99% uses oxygen (a few use sulfur).

So evidence pointing towards a common ancestor for all life here on Earth, or at least very similar common ancestors, might imply that of a seeding event, there wasn't much variety.

However, if we assume a seeding event happened, what's to say it couldn't happen on a lot of planets around the same area at the same time? The Fermi paradox is too speculative to say we aren't the only ones.

One thing that's missing is a seeding mechanism. Can an asteroid eject enough debris for some of it to reach escape velocity on a planet like ours? Did these protozoa come from a very different (but chemically compatible) environment?

I am curious if floating microbes in our atmosphere can just randomly leave the planet - like are particles small enough to undergo Brownian motion subject to the same escape velocity ?

If we work under this assumption, then I’d expect all the living material out there to be of the same chemistry and origin - again unproven conjecture but I’ll be surprised if two life forms of completely different chemistries can compete on comparable levels in the same environment - one will probably always be more efficient than other due to fundamental limits on the chemistry of their constituent molecules; I feel like new life of any chemistry can only form in a sterile environment since pre existing life seems to find ways to harness all available energy in any environment quite soon. Thus if we have life of a particular form floating ready to contaminate any new planet, then it’s possible that life of no other form can form in that galactic neighbourhood!

So the Star Trek episode where they discover why all the species around the galaxy all have DNA based genetics is probably on the money if you ask me!

If all the environments are made of rocks and water (and therefore oxygen and hydrogen atmosphere) then chemically you've got enough for converting sunlight to power, surely?

"The Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life" - https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2019.2045

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