Excellent post—the analysis of our temporal rank with regards to star formation are interesting and novel (for me). I look forward to your next post.
The gist of this is that the astronomical evidence appear to strongly support mediocrity, and thus a prior in which biological life is not super rare.
I’m especially interested in what kind of bets you’d place concerning future discovery for life elsewhere in the solar system such as Europa. I hope you cover Mars too at some point.
Given the current state of origin-of-life research that is starting to support tying early biochemistry to geochemistry rather than ‘primordial soup’ type situations and the apparent speed of life’s origin on Earth, it’s easy to imagine life arising multiple times in multiple places in our solar system. Can’t say that it did or didn’t though, we’d need way more data.
Given the differences between Earth and other places in our solar system, there’s definitely not going to be any other big biospheres with huge amounts of biomass and complexity that utterly remake the geochemistry of a body; instead any other biospheres would necessarily be both tiny and very hard to see due to hanging onto small matter and energy fluxes in protected regions of their homes.
Given the sheer difficulty of exploring other bodies for these small things in protected niches, it’s entirely possible that we could’ve missed several of these small biospheres (past or present) so far. As such I would not be terribly surprised at future evidence of these things. Mars is great because you’ve got an exposed surface that may have been very different in the past that you can look for traces on plus inklings that there could still be productive niches in places its not inconceivable you could look at, it’s ‘close’ (all things considered), and the interesting spots aren’t all under kilometers of ice. It’s also still an entire planet that has barely been looked at up close at all so far and where it costs an instrument’s weight in gold to send it there.
In the case of Mars, we have an improbable advantage, because there is already a huge industry and body of knowledge devoted to the discovery of organic-rich rock deposits in regions that are likely to preserve complex carbon forms. If there ever was an ecosystem on the surface of Mars, Exxon will help us find it.
(Although actually, Mars lacks active tectonic plates, so it’s not quite the same problem. But many industry tricks and technologies will transfer seamlessly.)
Excellent post—the analysis of our temporal rank with regards to star formation are interesting and novel (for me). I look forward to your next post.
The gist of this is that the astronomical evidence appear to strongly support mediocrity, and thus a prior in which biological life is not super rare.
I’m especially interested in what kind of bets you’d place concerning future discovery for life elsewhere in the solar system such as Europa. I hope you cover Mars too at some point.
Preview:
Given the current state of origin-of-life research that is starting to support tying early biochemistry to geochemistry rather than ‘primordial soup’ type situations and the apparent speed of life’s origin on Earth, it’s easy to imagine life arising multiple times in multiple places in our solar system. Can’t say that it did or didn’t though, we’d need way more data.
Given the differences between Earth and other places in our solar system, there’s definitely not going to be any other big biospheres with huge amounts of biomass and complexity that utterly remake the geochemistry of a body; instead any other biospheres would necessarily be both tiny and very hard to see due to hanging onto small matter and energy fluxes in protected regions of their homes.
Given the sheer difficulty of exploring other bodies for these small things in protected niches, it’s entirely possible that we could’ve missed several of these small biospheres (past or present) so far. As such I would not be terribly surprised at future evidence of these things. Mars is great because you’ve got an exposed surface that may have been very different in the past that you can look for traces on plus inklings that there could still be productive niches in places its not inconceivable you could look at, it’s ‘close’ (all things considered), and the interesting spots aren’t all under kilometers of ice. It’s also still an entire planet that has barely been looked at up close at all so far and where it costs an instrument’s weight in gold to send it there.
In the case of Mars, we have an improbable advantage, because there is already a huge industry and body of knowledge devoted to the discovery of organic-rich rock deposits in regions that are likely to preserve complex carbon forms. If there ever was an ecosystem on the surface of Mars, Exxon will help us find it.
(Although actually, Mars lacks active tectonic plates, so it’s not quite the same problem. But many industry tricks and technologies will transfer seamlessly.)