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Comment by wishfish | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget about Enceladus. Also a massive ocean with the added benefit of shooting enormous geysers into space. Would be wonderful if our solar system had at least 3 worlds with ocean life.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/enceladus

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imagine if we could harness the power of the sun and basically direct extra heat towards target moons and planets via a mirror system or something and basically make any body in our solar system human habitable warm.

I'd imagine this could also be weaponized against dangerous asteroids, as the heat laser or whatever could cause a change in direction.

or terrible news a la great filter arguments

Except those are utter nonsense. The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there, so we can't deduce anything about their existence from the fact we haven't detected them. The "Fermi" "paradox" is like someone locked in a bathroom going "OMG I can't see anybody! Everybody on earth must have died!!".

> The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there

That’s not true at all - simple assumptions would make it likely we would have encountered intelligent life if it evolved in the past in this galaxy.

We don't have the technology to detect signals similar to our own from the distance of even the nearest stars [1], and there is no reason to assume that more technologically advanced civilisations will generate vastly larger signals. Therefore the absence of detection to date tells us nothing, except to place an extremely generous upper bound on the power of signals they generate.

[1] https://www.seti.org/press-release/can-et-detect-us - where a SETI researcher concludes an alien civilisation around a nearby star would require technology much more advanced than ours to detect us. (And what technology we do have has been pointed at a vanishingly small fraction of the planets in the galaxy.)

We wouldn’t need to detect signals - life arising only a few hundred million years earlier than us would easily have been able to send physical artifacts/vehicles/harvesting to every system in the entire galaxy if they had interstellar travel.

If life were common enough that it has evolved multiple times in the same solar system (excluding panspermia) then this becomes almost a certainty that it should have occurred

What a big assumption to make though. Billions of years of life on earth and an object was first put in space what 80 years ago? This technological age of ours could very well just be a blip. Its far more likely based on our own planet that intelligent life does none of these things. We might not have civilization at all if we didn’t happen to farm, we could both be preparing for our morning hunt and foraging just as easily as we are preparing for work today, if events happened only slightly differently. N=1 here. Our trajectory is no generalized model.

Yes, it is possible that there is a large filter between developing life and getting to where we are. I can't deny that that is a possible explanation for the observed Fermi paradox.

But finding independent life on other planets would eliminate a whole class of great filters, making it more likely the filter is either as you said or that it is ahead of us. It is bad news imo if it is more likely than before that the filter is ahead of us. And that is unambiguously the case if we were to find life on another planet. Not proof positive it is ahead of us, but it shifts the probabilities.

And yes, it took billions of years for life to evolve, but if we find life in our solar system, that is potentially billions of opportunities for life independently evolving.

All you need is one single civilization to develop von Neumann probes and then they’re everywhere in the universe (or at least Galaxy). If life really is so ubiquitous as to be found in 3 different planets or moons in our solar system then we’re totally screwed.

How many different life forms have there been on earth? Billions? How many of these have made von neumann probes? Zero. All these assumptions about how intelligent life should look are always so anthropocentric and rooted in assumptions we make based on supposition or even sci fi stories. Meanwhile, your dog is an example of intelligent life, and it engages in none of these pursuits.

Why do people insist that intelligent life had to take the turns we took over the last couple thousands of years? Intelligent life is far more likely to look like how humans have lived for the last couple hundred thousand years than the last few thousand. I’d argue a flock of birds qualifies as intelligent life.

It makes sense temporally.

If you have a species that is intelligent and has the capacity to evolve to more and more sophisticated tool building, then that will build on itself. If life is so common that it has arisen independently on other planets in our solar system, it would be likely that these intelligent species would have arisen hundreds of millions of years before us.

And even if most don't advance to interstellar travel, it really only takes a few expansionary ones if they were sufficiently long ago that we would have seen evidence. Again, if life is so common it is on other bodies independently in our solar system, this should have happened probably.

> The "Fermi" "paradox" is like someone locked in a bathroom going "OMG I can't see anybody! Everybody on earth must have died!!".

I’m going to try this today just to see how my wife reacts.

It's also utter nonsense because we have already detected UAP NHIs and are gradually beginning to understand them as the stigma fades away.

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