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Solutions to Fermi Paradox & Thoughts

#fermi-paradox #cosmology #astrobiology

Solutions to Fermi Paradox & Thoughts

All life is subjected to Darwinian Evolution. They seek to survive, secure the resources, and multiply. The greatest obstacle to every individual are other individuals in the competition with the same goal. The goal is not only subjected to a single individual or species but to everyone. Thus, everyone has to struggle for existence. Those who survive and reproduce transmit their traits. Competition between species favored the survival of beings with advantageous traits.

Our own history is nothing sort of happy/healthy relationship with each other. For our survival—our species, Homo sapiens—we wiped out our last human cousins, Neanderthals. We became expansionists, and due to our competitive and expansionary culture, we spread faster and further, wiping out lives as well as a handful number of species into extinction. If we look at our own history, it is very clear that we are dangerous, not only to others, but also to ourselves.

In becoming expansionists, we might encounter others in space, trying to do the same thing: acquire more resources and expand.

The more advanced a civilization becomes, the easier it is for a single individual to do more harm than it was for entire civilization few centuries back!

My Statement

Arrogance and anger are often the unfortunate byproducts of religious certainty; humility is the gift of science. The reminder that all life shares an ancient bond—illustrated by our closer genetic relationship to fungi than fungi are to plants—is a profoundly unifying and humbling truth. This deep-seated connection is far more significant and awe-inspiring than the fable of individual, super-intelligent design.

I think it would be the greatest cosmic joke if it turns out that WE are the ancient precursor species.

My general rule in life has always been to ask myself, "what could be the most boring, infuriating, asinine, dumb answer?" Every single time, that's the answer.

Although a point to add: just because a great filter might be already behind us, doesn't rule out another one in front of us...

Earth still has plenty of anaerobes, and most of them live in the earth's crust. In fact, only terrestrial plants have more biomass in aggregate. For example, Bar-On et al (2018) estimated that there were around 77 gigatons of bacteria and archaea living (primarily) in deep subsurface environments. Another study that came out around the same time (Magnabosco et al. 2018) indicated that this might be high by up to an order of magnitude. However, that would still put the biomass of organisms living in the deep subsurface well ahead of that of all animals in aggregate (estimated to be about 2 gigatons). There was zero chance of microbial life ever going completely extinct on earth once it evolved. That said, I still think eukaryogenesis is a really important question. It's the only proposed "hard step" in our past that I still find credible, and I agree that it's still really unclear how easy/ hard it is.

Anaerobic microbes are super common in surface soils as well. Many are capable of going dormant when oxygen is present and become active when the soil is submerged. These microbes are actually super important in the nitrogen cycle as the conversion of nitrate to atmospheric nitrogen is an anaerobic metabolic pathway and is how nitrogen is recycled. Anaerobes originally from soil environments also evolved to live inside animal intestines (including humans) and are a vital part of digestion and responsible for the methane in farts.

Yeah though I would note that it seems increasingly likely given the growing evidence in support of the viral Eukaryogenesis hypothesis that the key event in Eukaryogenesis was probably the coordination of viral and host replication as a primary means of reproduction rather than utilizing the host cell membrane disassembly dispersal mechanism most viruses have used for billions of years. The decoupling of genome length from the amount of codable proteins is a pretty core innovation shared by both DNA and RNA viruses which is linked to their unique decoupling of transcription and translation compared to the codependent simultaneous transcription and translation shared by all prokaryotes so that innovation was likely already developed by viruses before being repurposed by endosymbiosis given that we now have fairly clear evidence that the ancestral Eukaryotic genome phylogenetically are part of the same evolutionary radiation as a major clade of DNA viruses.

We did not need the origin of eukaryotes in order for life on earth to survive the snowball after the great oxygenic events - most life on earth by species (and a lot by mass) are still prokaryotes. Prokaryotes are doing very well. Eukaryotes were just an interesting way to get through the problem and as we are one, and most things we see around us (trees, grass, people, pets, food) are eukaryotes, we have a bias towards them.

I do not think that it is the length of genes per se that is the issue here. I will need to read the paper, but gene length is likely a byproduct of something that I think could be the real great filter (I really should write a paper on it, but if anyone knows of one that has done it already, please link it to me):

Meiosis (sexual exchange of genetic material) is ancestral to all eukaryotes. It has a side effect: it encourages the proliferation of selfish genetic elements like transposable elements. So early eukaryotes (before or after the origin of the mitochondria) evolved MANY new defense mechanisms to turn off transposable elements. This includes cutting out introns (type II self splicing introns are selfish genetic elements) and this cause interrupted genes to emerge and led to alternative splicing, a major regulatory step in eukaryotic gene expression (and one of my favorites). I cannot list all, and many are still debated, but having a nucleus is another. NMD is one of my research focuses. RNA interference (2006 Nobel Prize winner) likely arose to fight selfish genetic elements. DNA methylation too. Histone tails with their rich modifications.

Something most of these defense features have in common: they allow for complex gene regulation that is a prerequisite for multicellular life. So complex life needs a complex cell for energy production etc. But it needs complex gene regulation, and that would not have arisen without meiosis! Maybe you could have a cell with a mitochondria without meiosis, but without meiosis you cannot have the complex life we have here on earth.

a funny joke to mention Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

You better hope that the Fermi Paradox is never solved because before you know it aliens will want to demolish our planet to make room for a hyperspace bypass and start reading bad poetry to us.

The obvious problem is not that the odds favour habitable planets. The problem would seem to be the likely hood of these planets reaching peak civilization at the same point in time. We might well have been contacted million years ago with a radio wave and missed it. The other is the sheer distance between civilizations. The laws of physics preclude travel faster than the speed of light. being that our own Milky Way is 100,000 light years across And we can't travel but a fraction of that speed. Travel to there will be impossible. And take billions of years. Is there lie out there ... almost surely but its is just as likely we will never find it. Let alone ever travel to it.

It's not a paradox, it's a mere open question with so many contributing factors to the solution it doesn't even have real implications to the life in the universe.

As intelligence is only one of many survival traits its evolution is not granted on a living planet. This alone narrows the multi-planet civilizations into minimum and also limits their technological development due to time potential of the single home planet.

All species evolve into the specific conditions of their planet, meaning that any migration to other planets and stars will always require full scale terraforming to be possible, which is a major technological step that most of the intelligent life probably wont reach (we haven't).

The life expectancy of a civilization might not be very long on a cosmic scale, narrowing down the amount and level of technological civilizations born and the chance they spread to other systems.

The obvious vast distances of space. The distances are so massive it narrows down the spreading potential of the civilizations again into a fraction of the already small. This also means that those few civilizations who reach this level are bound to spread absurdly slowly across the galaxy, and probably never be able to spread onto another galaxies.

The space is probably absolutely filled with small space gravel (leftover from planetary collisions and formations) that's nearly impossible to shield but capable of annihilating any unshielded spaceship colliding onto it at traveling speeds. This is especially true inside the solar systems, greatly reducing the amount of civilizations to ever spread out to the stars, as any collision will end an entire colony.

Any radio and similar wave signs of a civilization is minuscule at the cosmic scale, meaning the signs will get lost and distorted to the sheer volume of the background noise of space, and also probably also weakened to nonexistence by the collisions with all the clouds and other matter filling the space. It is also undefined what kind of wave trace should a civilization leave at its different stages of technological development, meaning we don't really even know what we are looking for.

Only technological civilizations give any detectable radio or similar wave trace of themselves to the space, ruling out literally 99,999...% of all life in the universe. While very high concentrations of life technically can be detected via telescopes, we have just barely discovered this technology ourselves and are only starting to study the exoplanets for traces of possible life. And the possibilities of all the different signs a life could leave in its planets trace is not defined, nor is it said that all life will ever effect their planet so much its visible to space.

This is what I think. I think there are intelligent civilizations out there in the rest of the universe. But they're so far away that we will never detect them, let alone contact them and they might as well not exist; same difference.

I don't buy The Dark Forest Hypothesis. How could all extraterrestrial civilizations be "paranoid"? Wouldn't there be others, similar to ourselves, who are just as curious and unaware as we are now? How could all civilizations be in harmony regarding information and threats? Are we to assume that all previously unaware and naive civilizations have already been wiped out, and that we're simply the last one, or nearly the last one standing? I just don't think it sounds very plausible.

It is highly likely, yes. But no, we have not found life yet outside earth. That's why missions to the moon, Mars, and even missions to others planets moons like Europa, are so important. If we find more life inside our own solar system, then we know for sure life must be abundant throughout the universe. Whether or not there is "intelligent" life is another matter. Probably. But both distance and time make it unlikely we would ever discover it. Humans have only existed for a fraction of a second when viewed on the universe 's timeline. And distance means it could take thousands of years to send/receive one message to another species, even within our own galaxy. So seeing as we're unlikely to survive this century, humanity will never know.

How can we assume that other life exists with such a small amount of data? We CANNOT assume whether there is or isn't other life because we don't know how rare it is. It could be common, or it may not be. Either way there is not enough data to justifiably announce that life exists or doesn't exist elsewhere.

I remember seeing a show that Dan Ackroyd did about his alien stories and the men in black. He said in this show “we had 60 years of flying to land on the moon. What if there’s a planet out there with life that’s a 1000 years ahead of us? It would be selfish of us to think we are the only ones in the universe”. It was something like that so yeah, I believe there is life out there and they might visit us. Dan Ackroyd knows a lot about Aliens.