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Comment by po | Hacker News Reader

So one thing to keep in mind here is that according to NASA, the meteorite itself is generating these compounds:

Thirdly, the team found these nucleobases -- both the biological and non-biological ones -- were produced in a completely non-biological reaction. "In the lab, an identical suite of nucleobases and nucleobase analogs were generated in non-biological chemical reactions containing hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water. This provides a plausible mechanism for their synthesis in the asteroid parent bodies, and supports the notion that they are extraterrestrial," says Callahan. (from the NASA article: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorit...)

This does not mean that there is developed life on another planet that then traveled to us. What it does mean is that the building blocks of life that were seeded on earth are probably pretty common and therefore were probably also seeded elsewhere.

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It means that the components of life are a "naturally" occurring things, which appear all over the universe, and do not require life to produce them. This in turn implies that life, not just any life, but carbon based, DNA using life, could be more common in the universe then previously thought. And this implies that we here on Earth are even less of an unique snowflake then we thought.

If we, here on Earth, are not unique precious snowflakes, then that makes the Fermi Paradox even more paradoxical.

And along those same lines, adds more weight to the implications of the Great Filter argument. That is, if the early steps in the path to intelligent life are really not that unlikely, then the later steps to advanced intelligent life are more unlikely.

Or, as Carl Sagan often suggested, intelligent life is likely to destroy itself, perhaps if a civilization's technological progress outpaces its ethical capacity.

Alternatively successful communication over vast distances turns out to be impossible or at least very rare.

The Fermi Paradox is like the "bumble bees can't fly" paradox, it merely means we don't understand the fundamentals of technological life in the Universe.

Edit: thanks downvoter, can you point me to your source of knowledge about all technological life in our Universe? I'd settle for just our galaxy if that's easier to come up with.

The problem with the Fermi paradox is that it doesn't tell us much. It could tell us that colonizing civilizations are unlikely or have a limited lifespan, or it could tell us merely that colonizing civilizations don't work at all the way we'd predict.

You were probably downvoted for saying "bumble bees can't fly" paradox since we know perfectly well how they fly. That's an urban legend.

Another possible explanation against the fermi paradox could be that interstellar communication, let alone travel is much more unlikely to occur even among highly advanced civilizations. maybe just travelling beyond our solar system might remain uneconomical for a long time.

Accelerando by Charles Stross (available for free here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...) has a great take on the whole idea (and is just a great novel for futurists in general).

Its conjecture is that physical travel to other civilizations is so expensive, and light-speed communications are so slow and inefficient, that the only way highly advanced civilizations communicate is by digitizing their consciousnesses and transmitting those, to be run in simulations on the receiving end. However, since you wouldn't want to transmit a copy of your own consciousness to an alien only to have it tortured or worse (even in a simulation), there are very extensive negotiations around trust involved before full contact with other civilizations is established.

I'd be extremely surprised if there was very little life on other planets. I'd also be extremely surprised if we could recognize it as life at a glance -- my guess is that it's so likely to be so completely different from us that that even knowing what to look for is going to be hard.

Life is probably not that rare. Familiar life probably is.

I think maybe on a macro level, but microbial life seems likely to be pretty similar to ours.

Even on a macro scale though, I imagine you'd probably see some of the same themes (assuming an Earth-like planet): photosynthesis, bilateral symmetry, hemoglobin- or hemocyanin-based blood, etc.

Or we are the first.

Absolutely. Also, for those not necessarily familiar with the composition of outer space: hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water are all relatively common "out there", as in "in the spaces between planets and stars and everything else.

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