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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the excitement for finding life on Mars. I personally really, really hope we do not find life on Mars.

If we find even the most basic microbial life, NASA is going to shut down all future exploration in the interest of Martian planetary protection. China and Russia probably won't, but the US will cripple itself (again) out of caution.

On a more existential level, finding life elsewhere in the solar system (assuming it's not diaspora from earth or vice versa) says really dark things about our own potential. If life is truly common in the universe, the fact that we haven't seen it anywhere means that the great filter is still in front of us -- and nobody has slipped through.

OTOH, if the great filter is behind is, there's no data about our likelihood of killing ourselves before we do manage to explore the rest of the known universe. This is such a better outcome.

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Pretty confident we'd still explore, just with some (appropriate) care. Too many fascinating scientific questions to answer once we discover extraterrestrial life. And if Russia and China did, the US definitely would too --- what would be the point of standing on principal in that hypothetical?

Meanwhile if you're hoping, why not just hope directly that the Great Filter is behind us? It's totally plausible that the window for multicellular life to survive on a planet is generally short, like on Mars, and not long, like on Earth. Or a million other possible explanations that we also have no data for or against right now. I like to keep my science-related hopes on the side of the coolest possible result .

The great filter is that tech is to easy, but self-awareness and self-discipline is hard. So life presses onwards, demanding exponential energy density from tech, to not be forced to limit itself and self-discipline itself.

Thus ever more potent tools are handed out to avoid confrontation with the "overcome" animal nature - and once that equation reaches the end of the line (easy energy and resources exhausted), a nearly unchanged animal with exponential power tools in hand, reverts to tribalistic warfare. Nothing recovers from this.

The greatest damage done, is the lie that life can learn and change, which never holds up under stress. The most valuable achievement to escape the filter, is investigate our nature realistically and apply controlled technological crippling, while testing the tools to calm the evil spirits of our nature, even under stress.

So technology is the problem and the solution, if applied with a real effort to understand humanity, beyond the "I wish for X and by the magic of wishful thinking it becomes reality instantly". Its hard work - similar to somebody diagnosing ones own mental limitations, and building a limited operating system for that crippled system. In a way- its the ultimate hack.

There could be civilizations out there that never developed aggression.

If they never developed aggression then they are not eating each other. Animals eat other animals because of the high concentration of nutrients in living things. Eating highly nutritious things allows an organism to develop both physically and mentally.

So they either have an abundant source of nutrients that has not been depleted for their entire evolution, or they are not highly developed, or they have developed aggression.

I agree, but plants are nasty too, just in slow motion.

For example some ficus grow over other trees, and later the roots cover the old tree until it dies. They don't eat the other tree, just "reuse" the wood to have an initial high place to get light. I coudn't find a nice link about this, but here are a few photos https://www.flickr.com/photos/rodolfocol/15129590163/in/phot... https://www.alamy.es/brasil-el-pantanal-parasito-higuera-fic...

Also, the eternal war between grass and forest comes to mind, the concept of fast, regenerative and self-destructive vs longterm investment killing the looping upstarts below.

Include in that the fire-economy of some forest and savannahs + the animals marshalled by these ecosystems and "peaceful" nature stops looking peaceful

http://akkartik.name/post/2012-11-21-07-09-03-soc

Billions of people were just asked to spend over a year locked down in isolation, and most did it voluntarily without reverting to tribalistic warfare (threats on fringe social media platforms notwithstanding). We've also in modern times seen what happens when famine strikes. Mostly people just suffer quietly and die.

Ah slight economic down-turn sparked a right-wing totalitarian resurgence across the whole world.

The lockdown mostly worked, because panem (food) and circensis (movie-streams and gaming) were continuously supplied. But, yes you have a point, the species behaved remarkably well under stress. But then, we also have a lot of social implants now too (cellphone-panopticon) and crowd-sourced anger-management.

Also its been half a year, since a angry crowd stampeded into the capitol building of a nuclear power.

Personally, I don't believe in the great filter hypothesis. The universe is incredibly vast enough entire civilizations can likely go through millions of years of births and deaths without ever having contact with another alien life form. Humans have a huge bias to feel "special".

We've only been broadcasting radio waves for a few decades now, and even that would just be lost in the background noise at large distances.

It would be extremely surprising if we even find any life outside the solar system for at least a few centuries.

I don't think this gives appropriate weight to exponential growth.

If humans are ever able to leave the earth and even theoretically establish permanent habitation, it's unthinkable that no other civilization has done so.

Even so the galaxy (let alone the universe) is huge, and faster-than -light or extra-dimensional travel is probably impossible. Contact with another civilization is extremely unlikely even if life is abundant in the galaxy.

Check out von neumann automatons. The idea is that once you started colonizing, you'd cover the entire galaxy in ~a million years, aka very quickly on a galactic timescale.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft

A galaxy is very tiny on the scale of the universe.

Sure, but the gp said galaxy.

the universe is huge and time is long, there could be millions of civilizations and we could happen to exist at a time that doesn’t coincide with a single one

The universe is extremely young. We might just be tied for first, if it takes 3rd generation stars for example.

Alternatively both instances of life could be linked. https://www.space.com/22577-earth-life-from-mars-theory.html

That said my gut says hypothetically talking about the danger of a universal great filter is silly when we clearly face near term filters of our own design right now (climate change, environmental collapse, a nuclear arms race)

Massive loss of life or economic disruption, while hugely bad, is not what a great filter means in this context. If earth's climate returns to pre-holocene greenhouse gas levels, temperature and sea levels the human race would not be cut off from the stars in a fundamental way.

I think the excitement is that it would give us another data point for what life can possibly be like. So far (AFAIK) the best evidence is that life evolved once on earth, and so everything we see comes from that basic blue print. But does it have to be that way? Would alien life also be carbon based, or something else? Is DNA/RNA (or a close equivalent) a universal feature of life? If not what do they use instead? If so, that's also very interesting. There's just so many questions we can't answer when the sample size is one. I guess my belief (hope?) is that that curiosity would spur further exploration, not kill it.

As for the great filter, yeah, it's a bit scary if we rule out bio-genesis as an option, but that still leaves the single to multi cell jump behind us (and arguably development of human level cooperation/problem solving, but I'm less sold on that one).

> China and Russia probably won't, but the US will cripple itself (again) out of caution.

Do you have any concrete examples when this happened before? Writing (again) implies you think there was already such a precedent.

did you read Bostrom's article with the same opinion?

https://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf

first I've seen it but my initial thought is that he does not think probable as much as I do that a great filter may exist in the practicality of interstellar travel. if so, it's not a buzzkill to find pangolin skeletons on mars. we're all in this cul de sac together.

If we do find life on other planets, I hope that it unites us more and we stop thinking in tribes of US, Russia and China and just work together as inhabitants of Earth.

I'm always on side of knowing than not knowing. Finding truly alien life would change society forever, maybe we would get more humble. As Carl Sagan put on Pale Blue Dot.

Perhaps that would be a benefit, it could spur action to focus more and create L5 colonies faster.

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