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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

I like playing with the odds and changing the unknowns to extremes in my head - what if abiogenesis is relatively common given the right conditions and enough time, and also that panspermia is common. This would mean that life could both easily arise alone on a planet and also the universe would be strewn with asteroids scattered everywhere carrying single-celled organisms/simple life.

Ignoring the question of the likelihood of intelligent life out there, I do wonder if maybe the universe is full of lush planets with lots of related lifeforms across trillions of star systems.

Could life even cross into new galaxies this way? I dunno! But it's fun to think about.

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The most interesting thing about it though is the Fermi Paradox. Our species entire existence isn't even a blink on a galactic timescale. And in another blink we will likely have spread all around this galaxy, and perhaps even further. If we imagine things that are already reasonably viable like exploratory swarms - glorified robotic 3d printers that can harvest their own material for further self replication and spread, we'll be absolutely everywhere in no time. The implications of this being that advanced life will likely tend to expand exceptionally rapidly, and visibly, on a galactic timescale.

So the seemingly logical argument that life should be extremely common, begs the question... well then where is it?

With our current technology, long distance space travel is out of the question -- just getting to the moon is challenging and Mars is still a dream.

I love me some Star Trek so I have hope of greater things but I'll never get a chance to see it.

I wouldn't say it's that far off at all. All of the component technologies are already present, and really have been for decades. The first NASA flyby plan of Mars was planned in the mid 60s, and set for 1976. It was scuttled due to budgetary issues.

The only problem is $$$ and risk. We're happy to casually spend hundreds of billions of dollars on obscure geopolitical goals half way around the world, but fight nickle and dime for visionary goals that might genuinely positively reshape humanity. And the other issue will be risk.

Most early colonists will, in all probability, not meet pleasant ends - like literally every colonization effort, ever. And so it's important to have a society that can recognize and praise them for their bravery, try to prevent what killed them from killing the next batch, and immediately continue carrying on.

I agree that the way we fund (and don't fund) programs is crazy.

It will be a significant time before we colonize the Mars or Venus, and that's only within our solar system.

We're going to have to practice and master doing that before we can consider putting people in a giant can in space with zero guarantees that their efforts will succeed.

I'm not trying to dismiss the value of it, just that we've got a long way to go and a lot of problems to solve first.

I wonder if there's bits of dinosaurs in space from the impact that killed them. We have Mars meteors that hit Earth. Maybe Mars has Earth Meteors?

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