"Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"
For residents of our hypothetical planet, that moment, which seems very important to me, would be hard to have!
You see it a lot in space conversations because it covers planetary gravity in an interesting way.
It is, somehow, very bleak and pessimistic compared to your average (western?) sci-fi.
I started reading the first book before I started using this method, and abandoned the series a couple times but saw it coming up so often in sci-fi recommendations I kept wanting to get through it
I found the first half of book one elicited no interest in reading in my down time, but was just barely interesting enough to not quit listening.
By the second half of book one and the entire rest of the series (plus the author approved fan fiction fourth book) I completely gave up on the audiobook because the story was so good that I wanted to read it as quickly as possible. I actually switched to reading on my phone in the shower over listening.
It starts off slow but gets good and stays extremely good. One of my favorite series.
Otherwise it'll be like drinking from a firehose.
I don't know, I lived in China for 9 years, and scifi and fantasy media were highly discouraged by the party (as mentioned in the wiki link), and no one I knew had anything to recommend that was originally written in Chinese. When Three Body Problem came out, people went nuts. Every nerd and engineer in the country read it.
There's the rub. Access to the world's cultural resources is highly limited in China. They've outright firewalled the internet.
Liu's writing is incredible, but he reminds me of George RR Martin or.....bare with me..Vince McMahon. Unable to get beyond the "fleshing out" phase.
The standalone book Old Man's War is also incredible.
And of course....Hyperion is the king of the entire genre. If you haven't read those I'd highly recommend it, will change your life.
If you go in expecting adventure fiction, then it's not enjoyable. It's more like reading something like Olaf Stapledon.
[1] The Three-Body Problem (trilogy)
[2] A Fire Upon the Deep
If you don't want to read the books at least check out the idea of the "Zones of Thought" that is the interesting concept in the second book.
Maybe we are not special. But we can accidentally be one of the first.
That would mess with the scientists.
the range of possible observations that we could make about the universe is limited by the fact that observations could only happen in a universe capable of developing intelligent life in the first place
It may be that prokaryotic life is common, but the mitochondria and plastids of eukaryotes took a very long time to emerge (absent for more than half of the total habitable life of the earth).
Was it this billion years or that billion years
probability of our experience matching another planet’s experience in the same time frame is low
Chloroplasts enabled direct harvest of photons from our parent star.
We are actually older than the plants.
These are going to leave a signature in the gas of an exoplanet, if they happen.
If some planet had oxygen rich atmosphere from the get go it might have sped up the evolution of life by a billion years or few.
Not an expert, but mitochondria didn't "emerge." Mitochondria co-evolved as bacteria, merged and became organelles through complex protein-import machinery and insertion into inner membranes of protein carriers for extracting energy for the host cell.
This was the ignition of complex, multicellular biology. What else could explain it?
I will admit that I thought they were closer to the Cambrian Explosion. This is much farther away than I thought.
"Eukaryotes emerged approximately 2.2 billion years ago, during the Proterozoic eon, likely as flagellated phagotrophs."
I think it is a matter of semantics because it seemed like you have a different understanding of the meaning of the word emerge then the person you are responding to. Within the context of the original post, the word emerge has nothing to do with the physical location of mitochondria and the eukaryotic cell. Instead, the meaning of emergence was to come into existence from non-existence. That is to say, your objection relies on a different semantic understanding of the word used. It is unclear to me if you don't understand this meaning or if you understand it but disagree with others using it.
Similarly, I would argue that a "mitochondria" not living in a parent so is not a mitochondria at all. Again, this is a matter of semantics. It relies on the meaning of the word mitochondria and how it is defined.
Bay way of comparison, is a person who buys a house homeless or a homeowner? Are humans prototocells because our evolutionary history can be traced back to them?
I'm not sure why you're continuing to try to make it clear to me that you're not wrong when we simply disagree, but your statement here employs nominal fallacy, or naming fallacy. Mitochondria is that same bacteria that it used to be prior to entering into a symbiotic relationship within the cell. It's a relatively new scientific revelation that mitochondrion organelles lived as bacteria discrete from its current function inside a cell. We may call this that and that this, to keep track of function, but it doesn't mean that a spade isn't a shovel.
2) In any case, mitochondria have evolved, and are now distinct species from their ancestors that cannot survive outside the cell.
3) Fittingly, a spade is pointed, while a shovel is square tipped.
Those living on such a planet might even reasonably conclude that advanced life on a planet within a galaxy, like our own, was very unlikely.