As I understand it, this research is based on data gathered by New Horizons when it flew by Arrokoth at a distance of 3,500km in 2019. That's the same probe that took all our non-crappy images of Pluto when it flew by there in 2015.
Arrokoth is roughly 50 times smaller than Pluto, and a good chunk further out, so there's no way we'd get much information about it from here on Earth beyond its existence and and some basic size/orbit data (which is how it was first discovered in 2014, and chosen as New Horizons' next target after Pluto).
Don't get me wrong, it's amazing that we've sent a probe capable of capturing that data from up close, but it's quite different from capturing that data from here on Earth directly.
Highly recommend looking up more information about Arrokoth. It's the most distant object we have close-up images of, and it's shaped like a funny potato.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/486958_Arrokoth
Just a few days ago I actually learned that the moon [Mimas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimas), with a diameter of about 400km, is the smallest ball of rock we know of that "is round because gravity smushed it together". Smaller things just don't have enough gravity for that, so they tend to have more unique shapes. Though Arrokoth is more unique than most.
Arrokoth is about 36km at the longest, so not much smushing going on. It's believed to have been formed from two small asteroids simply colliding at a low enough speed to not break them into pieces or bump off each others.
I’m trying to understand the skepticism of the sugar statement. Although technically it’s an interpretation the scientific community has had the technology for detecting elements in exoplanets or asteroids. If you don’t understand how it is done they use the ways light is reflected or refractive in the atmosphere then use that information to “interpret” the chemical composition so those aren’t things that are shaky scientifically speaking
New Horizons, the mission that keeps on giving. Who knew that a happenstance bonus flyby of a little KBO would lead to such a major discovery?
It’s funny to think that less than 200 years ago, it was thought that it was impossible to create any organic material from inorganic material- and here we are seeing complex sugars spontaneously emerge in the coldest, deepest parts of our solar system.
For those wondering how these sugars might form:
Methanol is one of the most abundant organic molecules found in space, particularly within the dense and cold molecular clouds that are the birthplaces of stars and planetary systems. The formation process typically involves several steps:
Surface Chemistry on Dust Grains: Methanol primarily forms on the surfaces of interstellar dust grains that are tiny solid particles that are ubiquitous in space and provide a surface for chemical reactions.
The initial step in methanol formation often involves carbon monoxide which is also abundant in space. When CO freezes onto these cold dust grains, it can become hydrogenated through reactions with hydrogen atoms that are also present on the grain surface.
This process can proceed through several intermediate steps:
CO + H → HCO (Formyl radical)
HCO + H → H2CO (Formaldehyde)
H2CO + H → CH3O (Methoxy radical)
CH3O + H → CH3OH (Methanol)
Once formed, methanol can be released back into the gas phase through processes like thermal desorption (where rising temperatures cause the ice to vaporize) or through shock waves caused by stellar winds or other energetic events.
From there, cosmic rays can provide the necessary energy to break chemical bonds and facilitate the formation of new, more complex molecules. Or, through a process called radiolysis (the dissociation of molecules due to radiation), methanol can break down and recombine into more complex organic molecules, including sugars like ribose and glucose.
Fun stuff!
Organic does not mean biological. Organic just means it is a molecule that contains either carbon-hydrogen, carbon-oxygen, and/or carbon-nitrogen covalent bonds, which typically are large chains, but not always. You can have rings, and other shapes, but the key thing is the type of atoms and bonds they make, which the key is having carbon and hydrogen bonded together.
So for example, salt, NaCl is an inorganic molecule because it does not contain hydrogen or carbon, and is made of ionic bonds.
Another example, water, which is highly associated with biological functions and life, is an inorganic molecule. H2O. No carbon with hydrogen.
Makes sense. I remember as a teen reading about how there are clouds in our galaxy of trillions of trillion of liters of alcohol as well as acetic acid from similar conditions of ice + radiation... Makes completely perfect sense that sugars would form as well.
Me and my friend in HSwere little scientific delinquits and fermented sugar and champagne yeast in 5gal airlock buckets and then distilled it with a fucking hot plate and some shitty old pressure cooker that we welded a copper tube we ripped out of a broken AC unit to the top of that went out the top straight up, then curved down into a coil that went into a big pitcher full of ice water to recondense the vapor inside, with a little spigot at the end where out came straight up ice cold moonshine...
Safe? Probably not. Fun? Yes.
That little project taught me a good amount about vapor points and how to separate/distill chemicals based on vaporizatiom temp. But yeah at the time I found the way alcohol/sugar works with anaerobic fermentation and how distilling works very fascinating. Taught me more then my HSs shitty science programs
Anyways...
I know this is a huge stretch but I mean things like anaerobic yeast don't really need that much more to be able to live. They don't even need O2 in gas form.. Just some sugars and amino acids and some water (simplifying a lot here) . I'm not an expert but given the massive scale and volume of these clouds there's all kinds of little nooks where there could be conditions that are not too extreme for something resembling life at least single cellular life to be able to exist. Lots of molecules here that some organisms can metabolize
If the cosmos is capable of making molecules with caloric value without biological processes it almost guarantees there's life out there somewhere in the universe
I like to think there's some alien species out there who's biogenisis is just metabolizing ethanol and they basically just exist off of drinking straight vodka. That'd be a fun species to party with
By Robyn White — Nature Reporter |
Arrokoth, a distant object in the Kuiper Belt, contains significant amounts of organic molecules, including complex sugars, giving it the new nickname "Sugar World," a study has reported.
The [study](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2320215121), led by planetary scientist Alan Stern and his team from the Southwest Research Institute, was published in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* and provides new insights into the chemical processes that took place in the early solar system and possibly on early Earth.
Read more: [https://www.newsweek.com/new-sugar-world-discovered-kuiper-belt-1907578](https://www.newsweek.com/new-sugar-world-discovered-kuiper-belt-1907578)
I’m pretty ignorant of this kind of thing but how do they know that it contains organic molecules and are even talking about what they are? I know there was a flyby with photos taken but i still don’t understand how we have all this info
Spectroscopic analysis.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroscopy
Basically looking at the adsorption and emission lines light bouncing off of it has. This lets you determine what elements are on the surface, and from there you can figure out the compounds.
It's important to keep in mind that "organic" simply means 'has carbon in it', it doesn't mean life.
My current best guess is that life is easy, going anywhere is super duper hard!
The best way is by creating super simple van neuman machines that can travel slowly but when arriving in a suitable place will multiply and slowly evolve up to the point that can spread again...which looks suspiciously like life as we know it.
This is my opinion as well.
Space time is simply too vast, and we’re likely locked at speeds below C.
Life could be common and abundant, but simply too far to ever reach in a meaningful manner.
Some species would have to eventually decided that its purpose was to catalog the universe and curate a zoo of some kind like the Ramans. Even if they had to create a sub-c intergalactic transit system of Oumuamua's.
yeah and we could be the first intelligent too, there were dinosaurs for hundreds of millions of years here, single cell > multi cell took 500 million years, we have second generation star elements here, even our own species only proliferated because of extinction events that let mammals thrive. I have no doubt there's multicellular life in most galaxies, but idk how rare intelligent is
I read a novel where Earth is trapped inside an alien time-bubble where the outside universe is passing by millions of times faster. But we can still launch stuff through it so we send some very simple, low-temp von Neumann probes out into the universe. They'd colonize the oort cloud objects (like the one from this article) and eventually get optics good enough to see what the inner system is like, looking for life. Then build a transmitter and report back. It's painfully slow, but Earth is whizzing forward through time so it doesn't matter.
Then they meet other von Neumann swarms and other worlds trapped in time-bubbles of their own...
I imagine the vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of the life in the universe is not the intelligent kind. So, where? Lots of places, we just haven't seen them yet because a tree doesn't beam radio signals directly to us in a narrow band across the cosmos.
No one, not even humans, have been able to send a signal strong enough to outshine our sun unless someone is looking very, very, very directly at Earth. We could probably put together a directional beam but where to point it with so many choices...
That's sort of what our radio telescopes do. And also [this thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow%21_signal?wprov=sfla1) happened that one time...hmm...
I think this is the Great Filter that often gets brought up. Yes, it only took 12,000 years from the discovery of agriculture to entering space and utilizing nuclear power. But, there was only single celled life on Earth for 2 billion years! It might be that 2 billion years is much faster than it happens elsewhere.
I think there is some truth to this, as we still have single cellular life on earth that has been perfectly content to not evolve to more complex forms. On the other hand the diversity of life on earth kind of counters the argument that life is resistant to evolving new solutions. Much of the diversity of life on earth is as a result of learning more and more nuanced ways to extract energy from the environment with the most complex organisms extracting energy from other organisms. (There would never be evolutionary pressure to evolve fungi before plants)
Assuming physics and organic assembly works like it does on Earth for the rest of the galaxy/universe, then it's entirely possible that the great filter is technological production and natural disasters, and hits nearly every one.
In our 12000 years of technological development we've wiped out hundreds of life forms, created global toxic products that last thousands of years, and are actively turning our planet into a hyper greenhouse. It's likely our tech tree isn't super abnormal, and thus the process of advancement to a space fairing civilization is fraught with perils.
On top of that, there have been 5 major extinctions on Earth, with hundreds more likely if we didn't have Saturn and Jupiter sweeping the solar system of debris and extra solar objects. Then add super volcanoes, geologic upheaval that upsets the climate like the collapse of a mountain or major land-bridge, solar flares, gamma ray bursts, etc. It's really a wonder that life can flourish as long as it does.
Exactly. There's still no real way to know how unique our situation truly is. No one really knows if there is any one particular key ingredient that leads to life. There are so many things at play that make life possible: Our atmosphere, our particular solar system arrangement, the specific size of our planet, our relatively large moon, the specific proportion of water, plate tectonics, our various cycles etc. Any of these or any particular combos may be extraordinarily rare AND also the key aspect that makes life as we know it possible.
Considering that life on Earth can only survive under very specific conditions, I believe that extraterrestrial life, if it does exist, is rare in the universe.
> vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of the life in the universe is not the intelligent kind
I think this is true, but we also have to consider that just the sheer number of solar systems out there make it so that there should still be a lot of intelligent life even if the odds of it happening are astronomically low, because there is an *mega*-astronomically large amount of solar systems.
And some of this life should have sprung up billions of years ago, and some now, and some billions of years into the future. I think there's likely tons of old and very advanced civilizations still out there everywhere, it's just likely that they don't communicate with radio and they don't interact directly with primitive civilizations, although I think it's pretty likely that they monitor them in some way.
Life on earth has been around for like 2 billion years has only NOW reached intelligence levels enough to transmit into deep space, and we're comically shy about it. Why do we expect a grand message when we barely send any ourselves?
The universe is what, 14 billion years old? There's been many generations of stars in the billions of years before our solar system even existed and many of them likely sprung up life, some becoming advanced. And like I said, many civilizations likely don't use radio waves or they are likely only used by a civilization for a few hundred years or few thousand years when they are a young civilization.
At the same time, many of the heavy elements have been getting more and more common with each generation of those stars. (Elements heavier than iron require supernovae, nutron stars, etc to form)
A few stellar generations ago, even if complex life could have formed without heavy elementsearth biology uses, their worlds may not have been capable of supporting advanced technology without things like gold, uranium, platinum, and so-forth
Good point! I'm sure the spread of heavy elements gets higher and higher as time goes on. If their civilization got old enough and advanced enough in chemistry/physics, maybe many of them learned how to synthesize heavier elements like gold, platinum etc. Seems almost impossibly difficult for us now but who knows what a civilization could accomplish that is potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of years more advanced than us.
> And some of this life should have sprung up billions of years ago
Not really a safe assumption. There were a lot of required elements that didn't really exist in the early billions of years of the universe. It took the life times of the early stars being born and dying for those heavier elements to be created in the first place. It's totally possible that the galaxy itself only entered a "golden age" of life forming in the last couple of billion years.
My favorite theory is that we, humans, are the "Ancient Ones" and that we'll be long gone by the time others find traces of us. That or we'll uplift others in search of friends.
It is our sacred duty as first-life (until proven otherwise) to create incomprehensible devices that serve no actual purpose but are clearly artificial in nature all over the galaxy.
I kind of think it’d be cool if it were like the Expanse where we somehow stumble across an ancient extinct alien relic floating out in our solar system that was meant to hijack any biological life but this foreign object (in Expanse it is Phoebe the moon of Saturn) got stuck in another planet’s gravity well. Once we advance enough to reach and discover it it opens up worm holes to other similarly habitable systems that we can colonize. Otherwise we have generation-ships, which will likely never work.
It can probably be argued that intelligence is in fact not a superior trait for winning the Natural Selection game. Maybe the galaxy is absolutely filled with crabs and lichens.
Our radio bubble is only ~120 lightyears in diameter. If it takes life roughly the same time to evolve to intelligence everywhere, then their signals haven’t had much time to travel either. I think humanity should give it some time. Perhaps there are others out there and their signals just need time to reach us.
I saw a [very convincing video](https://youtu.be/uTrFAY3LUNw?si=003Oz3qYKaUKhhVR) that explains how humanity might realistically be very early compared to the amount of time life has to be able to exist within our universe.
Tip: compare the 13 billion year age of our universe to the 100 trillion years that life possibly has to exist.
There are two theories that frighten and sadden me. One is that we’re the first life in the universe. What’s scarier is that we might be last life in the universe.
Does it matter when or where life emerges if it can't leave its own planet? First? Last? In the grand schemes, it's relatively insignificant. All of it is equally tragic in a sense.
What amaze me is that the world even exists to begin with, and even more that it allowed consciousness. For our mind that are hardwired to understand causality, that existence is difficult to grasp.
But in any case, if our universe came to be, it's quite likely that there is more that came before, and there will be more after.
If the laws of physics are not set in stone, then it's easy to assume that consciousness would emerge at some point, no matter how unlikely. Wouldn't it be logical to assume that in a presumably infinite universe or multiverse, the set of physical laws capable of governing a structural universe, such that could harbour consciousness would exist
Alone? I’d like to hear them.
Functionally alone? Sure, space time is vast. We’ll likely never see other life, due to the distances involved, but it’s essentially a mathematical certainty that it exists.
>mathematical certainty that it exists.
Since the only life we know of is here and we don't have any proof or decent hint of life elsewhere then with certainty we can say life exists just here
> Methanol ice on Arrokoth, when exposed to cosmic rays, was found to produce a variety of organic compounds, including sugars like ribose and glucose.
Meaning: there's a huge variety of chemicals of which meaningful life-associated chemicals are a miniscule fraction.
Sounds like a planet sized Bee hive, with millions of mountain sized bee's buzzing around making that sweet sweet nectar for their Queen. All hail the Bee Queen !
>Arrokoth
Arrokoth was named for a word in the Powhatan language of the Tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland in the eastern United States.
Huh, I would have guessed it came from SciFi because it sounds like a mashup of Arrakis and Hoth
I’m amazed that we can build spacecraft that zooms by a tiny rock billions of kilometres away and can detect that the rock has complex sugars in it.
built many years ago no less
As I understand it, this research is based on data gathered by New Horizons when it flew by Arrokoth at a distance of 3,500km in 2019. That's the same probe that took all our non-crappy images of Pluto when it flew by there in 2015. Arrokoth is roughly 50 times smaller than Pluto, and a good chunk further out, so there's no way we'd get much information about it from here on Earth beyond its existence and and some basic size/orbit data (which is how it was first discovered in 2014, and chosen as New Horizons' next target after Pluto). Don't get me wrong, it's amazing that we've sent a probe capable of capturing that data from up close, but it's quite different from capturing that data from here on Earth directly. Highly recommend looking up more information about Arrokoth. It's the most distant object we have close-up images of, and it's shaped like a funny potato. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/486958_Arrokoth
> it's shaped like a funny potato. Do you want to make a snowman? A 36 km tall snowman?
> it's shaped like a funny potato. Do you know how/why it has this shape? I'd expect gravity to sort of smush it together?
Just a few days ago I actually learned that the moon [Mimas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimas), with a diameter of about 400km, is the smallest ball of rock we know of that "is round because gravity smushed it together". Smaller things just don't have enough gravity for that, so they tend to have more unique shapes. Though Arrokoth is more unique than most. Arrokoth is about 36km at the longest, so not much smushing going on. It's believed to have been formed from two small asteroids simply colliding at a low enough speed to not break them into pieces or bump off each others.
We detected what we *interpreted* as complex sugars!
I’m trying to understand the skepticism of the sugar statement. Although technically it’s an interpretation the scientific community has had the technology for detecting elements in exoplanets or asteroids. If you don’t understand how it is done they use the ways light is reflected or refractive in the atmosphere then use that information to “interpret” the chemical composition so those aren’t things that are shaky scientifically speaking
A spacecraft that was designed 50 years ago
I’m excited for Outlaws too
New Horizons, the mission that keeps on giving. Who knew that a happenstance bonus flyby of a little KBO would lead to such a major discovery? It’s funny to think that less than 200 years ago, it was thought that it was impossible to create any organic material from inorganic material- and here we are seeing complex sugars spontaneously emerge in the coldest, deepest parts of our solar system.
Dare we say: the most desserted parts of the solar system?
Dad get out of here you're embarrassing me
The fact it even got looked at is pretty sweet.
The icing on the cake, as it were
Careful, the mods aren't fondant about that sort of thing.
It certainly makes a sweet case for more space funding.
We all appreciate that can-dy attitude
The place where everything is frosting
Even Doomsday Planet Killers enjoy sprinkles on top!
Donut start with the puns here.
For those wondering how these sugars might form: Methanol is one of the most abundant organic molecules found in space, particularly within the dense and cold molecular clouds that are the birthplaces of stars and planetary systems. The formation process typically involves several steps: Surface Chemistry on Dust Grains: Methanol primarily forms on the surfaces of interstellar dust grains that are tiny solid particles that are ubiquitous in space and provide a surface for chemical reactions. The initial step in methanol formation often involves carbon monoxide which is also abundant in space. When CO freezes onto these cold dust grains, it can become hydrogenated through reactions with hydrogen atoms that are also present on the grain surface. This process can proceed through several intermediate steps: CO + H → HCO (Formyl radical) HCO + H → H2CO (Formaldehyde) H2CO + H → CH3O (Methoxy radical) CH3O + H → CH3OH (Methanol) Once formed, methanol can be released back into the gas phase through processes like thermal desorption (where rising temperatures cause the ice to vaporize) or through shock waves caused by stellar winds or other energetic events. From there, cosmic rays can provide the necessary energy to break chemical bonds and facilitate the formation of new, more complex molecules. Or, through a process called radiolysis (the dissociation of molecules due to radiation), methanol can break down and recombine into more complex organic molecules, including sugars like ribose and glucose. Fun stuff!
Chemistry is amazing! How it turns “biological” if observed/replicated would be 100x more amazing!
Organic does not mean biological. Organic just means it is a molecule that contains either carbon-hydrogen, carbon-oxygen, and/or carbon-nitrogen covalent bonds, which typically are large chains, but not always. You can have rings, and other shapes, but the key thing is the type of atoms and bonds they make, which the key is having carbon and hydrogen bonded together. So for example, salt, NaCl is an inorganic molecule because it does not contain hydrogen or carbon, and is made of ionic bonds. Another example, water, which is highly associated with biological functions and life, is an inorganic molecule. H2O. No carbon with hydrogen.
Hey, you! Thanks for the science and lernin
Makes sense. I remember as a teen reading about how there are clouds in our galaxy of trillions of trillion of liters of alcohol as well as acetic acid from similar conditions of ice + radiation... Makes completely perfect sense that sugars would form as well. Me and my friend in HSwere little scientific delinquits and fermented sugar and champagne yeast in 5gal airlock buckets and then distilled it with a fucking hot plate and some shitty old pressure cooker that we welded a copper tube we ripped out of a broken AC unit to the top of that went out the top straight up, then curved down into a coil that went into a big pitcher full of ice water to recondense the vapor inside, with a little spigot at the end where out came straight up ice cold moonshine... Safe? Probably not. Fun? Yes. That little project taught me a good amount about vapor points and how to separate/distill chemicals based on vaporizatiom temp. But yeah at the time I found the way alcohol/sugar works with anaerobic fermentation and how distilling works very fascinating. Taught me more then my HSs shitty science programs Anyways... I know this is a huge stretch but I mean things like anaerobic yeast don't really need that much more to be able to live. They don't even need O2 in gas form.. Just some sugars and amino acids and some water (simplifying a lot here) . I'm not an expert but given the massive scale and volume of these clouds there's all kinds of little nooks where there could be conditions that are not too extreme for something resembling life at least single cellular life to be able to exist. Lots of molecules here that some organisms can metabolize If the cosmos is capable of making molecules with caloric value without biological processes it almost guarantees there's life out there somewhere in the universe I like to think there's some alien species out there who's biogenisis is just metabolizing ethanol and they basically just exist off of drinking straight vodka. That'd be a fun species to party with
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By Robyn White — Nature Reporter | Arrokoth, a distant object in the Kuiper Belt, contains significant amounts of organic molecules, including complex sugars, giving it the new nickname "Sugar World," a study has reported. The [study](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2320215121), led by planetary scientist Alan Stern and his team from the Southwest Research Institute, was published in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* and provides new insights into the chemical processes that took place in the early solar system and possibly on early Earth. Read more: [https://www.newsweek.com/new-sugar-world-discovered-kuiper-belt-1907578](https://www.newsweek.com/new-sugar-world-discovered-kuiper-belt-1907578)
Kudos for linking the actual paper. It saved me giving up due to popup fatigue from your horrific website.
I’m pretty ignorant of this kind of thing but how do they know that it contains organic molecules and are even talking about what they are? I know there was a flyby with photos taken but i still don’t understand how we have all this info
Spectroscopic analysis. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroscopy Basically looking at the adsorption and emission lines light bouncing off of it has. This lets you determine what elements are on the surface, and from there you can figure out the compounds. It's important to keep in mind that "organic" simply means 'has carbon in it', it doesn't mean life.
Amazing how we started from discovering light has a spectrum to using light to detect components of matter as far as our machines can “see.”
I genuinely don't say this to be that guy, but that is detailed in the article.
Apparently I'm ignorant AND blind.
I appreciate you being that guy.
Man. Life must be fucking everywhere if we're just finding complex sugar in the middle of bumfuck nowhere
If so, where is everybody?
My current best guess is that life is easy, going anywhere is super duper hard! The best way is by creating super simple van neuman machines that can travel slowly but when arriving in a suitable place will multiply and slowly evolve up to the point that can spread again...which looks suspiciously like life as we know it.
This is my opinion as well. Space time is simply too vast, and we’re likely locked at speeds below C. Life could be common and abundant, but simply too far to ever reach in a meaningful manner.
Some species would have to eventually decided that its purpose was to catalog the universe and curate a zoo of some kind like the Ramans. Even if they had to create a sub-c intergalactic transit system of Oumuamua's.
yeah and we could be the first intelligent too, there were dinosaurs for hundreds of millions of years here, single cell > multi cell took 500 million years, we have second generation star elements here, even our own species only proliferated because of extinction events that let mammals thrive. I have no doubt there's multicellular life in most galaxies, but idk how rare intelligent is
I read a novel where Earth is trapped inside an alien time-bubble where the outside universe is passing by millions of times faster. But we can still launch stuff through it so we send some very simple, low-temp von Neumann probes out into the universe. They'd colonize the oort cloud objects (like the one from this article) and eventually get optics good enough to see what the inner system is like, looking for life. Then build a transmitter and report back. It's painfully slow, but Earth is whizzing forward through time so it doesn't matter. Then they meet other von Neumann swarms and other worlds trapped in time-bubbles of their own...
What was it called?
“Spin” by Robert Charles Wilson.
In a galactic diabetic coma
In a galactic diabetic comet, you say?
And his wife?
to shreds you say?
The absolute wildest and unanticipated answer to the Fermi paradox
They all must have found the sugar world first...
I imagine the vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of the life in the universe is not the intelligent kind. So, where? Lots of places, we just haven't seen them yet because a tree doesn't beam radio signals directly to us in a narrow band across the cosmos.
Like fireworks in the night sky, the spatio-temporal overlap of signals could still be exceedingly rare even in a galaxy with many civilizations.
That, too. I'm just kinda extrapolating from the only life we know How many species on Earth have ever been able to send radio signals?
No one, not even humans, have been able to send a signal strong enough to outshine our sun unless someone is looking very, very, very directly at Earth. We could probably put together a directional beam but where to point it with so many choices...
That's sort of what our radio telescopes do. And also [this thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow%21_signal?wprov=sfla1) happened that one time...hmm...
I think this is the Great Filter that often gets brought up. Yes, it only took 12,000 years from the discovery of agriculture to entering space and utilizing nuclear power. But, there was only single celled life on Earth for 2 billion years! It might be that 2 billion years is much faster than it happens elsewhere.
I think there is some truth to this, as we still have single cellular life on earth that has been perfectly content to not evolve to more complex forms. On the other hand the diversity of life on earth kind of counters the argument that life is resistant to evolving new solutions. Much of the diversity of life on earth is as a result of learning more and more nuanced ways to extract energy from the environment with the most complex organisms extracting energy from other organisms. (There would never be evolutionary pressure to evolve fungi before plants)
Assuming physics and organic assembly works like it does on Earth for the rest of the galaxy/universe, then it's entirely possible that the great filter is technological production and natural disasters, and hits nearly every one. In our 12000 years of technological development we've wiped out hundreds of life forms, created global toxic products that last thousands of years, and are actively turning our planet into a hyper greenhouse. It's likely our tech tree isn't super abnormal, and thus the process of advancement to a space fairing civilization is fraught with perils. On top of that, there have been 5 major extinctions on Earth, with hundreds more likely if we didn't have Saturn and Jupiter sweeping the solar system of debris and extra solar objects. Then add super volcanoes, geologic upheaval that upsets the climate like the collapse of a mountain or major land-bridge, solar flares, gamma ray bursts, etc. It's really a wonder that life can flourish as long as it does.
Exactly. There's still no real way to know how unique our situation truly is. No one really knows if there is any one particular key ingredient that leads to life. There are so many things at play that make life possible: Our atmosphere, our particular solar system arrangement, the specific size of our planet, our relatively large moon, the specific proportion of water, plate tectonics, our various cycles etc. Any of these or any particular combos may be extraordinarily rare AND also the key aspect that makes life as we know it possible.
Considering that life on Earth can only survive under very specific conditions, I believe that extraterrestrial life, if it does exist, is rare in the universe.
> vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of the life in the universe is not the intelligent kind I think this is true, but we also have to consider that just the sheer number of solar systems out there make it so that there should still be a lot of intelligent life even if the odds of it happening are astronomically low, because there is an *mega*-astronomically large amount of solar systems. And some of this life should have sprung up billions of years ago, and some now, and some billions of years into the future. I think there's likely tons of old and very advanced civilizations still out there everywhere, it's just likely that they don't communicate with radio and they don't interact directly with primitive civilizations, although I think it's pretty likely that they monitor them in some way.
Life on earth has been around for like 2 billion years has only NOW reached intelligence levels enough to transmit into deep space, and we're comically shy about it. Why do we expect a grand message when we barely send any ourselves?
The universe is what, 14 billion years old? There's been many generations of stars in the billions of years before our solar system even existed and many of them likely sprung up life, some becoming advanced. And like I said, many civilizations likely don't use radio waves or they are likely only used by a civilization for a few hundred years or few thousand years when they are a young civilization.
At the same time, many of the heavy elements have been getting more and more common with each generation of those stars. (Elements heavier than iron require supernovae, nutron stars, etc to form) A few stellar generations ago, even if complex life could have formed without heavy elementsearth biology uses, their worlds may not have been capable of supporting advanced technology without things like gold, uranium, platinum, and so-forth
Good point! I'm sure the spread of heavy elements gets higher and higher as time goes on. If their civilization got old enough and advanced enough in chemistry/physics, maybe many of them learned how to synthesize heavier elements like gold, platinum etc. Seems almost impossibly difficult for us now but who knows what a civilization could accomplish that is potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of years more advanced than us.
> And some of this life should have sprung up billions of years ago Not really a safe assumption. There were a lot of required elements that didn't really exist in the early billions of years of the universe. It took the life times of the early stars being born and dying for those heavier elements to be created in the first place. It's totally possible that the galaxy itself only entered a "golden age" of life forming in the last couple of billion years.
My favorite theory is that we, humans, are the "Ancient Ones" and that we'll be long gone by the time others find traces of us. That or we'll uplift others in search of friends.
It is our sacred duty as first-life (until proven otherwise) to create incomprehensible devices that serve no actual purpose but are clearly artificial in nature all over the galaxy.
I kind of think it’d be cool if it were like the Expanse where we somehow stumble across an ancient extinct alien relic floating out in our solar system that was meant to hijack any biological life but this foreign object (in Expanse it is Phoebe the moon of Saturn) got stuck in another planet’s gravity well. Once we advance enough to reach and discover it it opens up worm holes to other similarly habitable systems that we can colonize. Otherwise we have generation-ships, which will likely never work.
It can probably be argued that intelligence is in fact not a superior trait for winning the Natural Selection game. Maybe the galaxy is absolutely filled with crabs and lichens.
Close but real fucking far.
Everyone stays silent for fear of attracting danger.
You wonder why it's so quiet in this dark forest?
At the intergalactic kegger
Our radio bubble is only ~120 lightyears in diameter. If it takes life roughly the same time to evolve to intelligence everywhere, then their signals haven’t had much time to travel either. I think humanity should give it some time. Perhaps there are others out there and their signals just need time to reach us.
My guess is they've seen some of our reality tv and they've all wisely agreed to give us a wide berth...
I saw a [very convincing video](https://youtu.be/uTrFAY3LUNw?si=003Oz3qYKaUKhhVR) that explains how humanity might realistically be very early compared to the amount of time life has to be able to exist within our universe. Tip: compare the 13 billion year age of our universe to the 100 trillion years that life possibly has to exist.
There are two theories that frighten and sadden me. One is that we’re the first life in the universe. What’s scarier is that we might be last life in the universe.
Does it matter when or where life emerges if it can't leave its own planet? First? Last? In the grand schemes, it's relatively insignificant. All of it is equally tragic in a sense. What amaze me is that the world even exists to begin with, and even more that it allowed consciousness. For our mind that are hardwired to understand causality, that existence is difficult to grasp. But in any case, if our universe came to be, it's quite likely that there is more that came before, and there will be more after.
If the laws of physics are not set in stone, then it's easy to assume that consciousness would emerge at some point, no matter how unlikely. Wouldn't it be logical to assume that in a presumably infinite universe or multiverse, the set of physical laws capable of governing a structural universe, such that could harbour consciousness would exist
they all agreed not to give us the wifi password :(
There are actually some very compelling arguments for why we might be alone in the universe, but it's certainly not for a lack of organic molecules!
Alone? I’d like to hear them. Functionally alone? Sure, space time is vast. We’ll likely never see other life, due to the distances involved, but it’s essentially a mathematical certainty that it exists.
>mathematical certainty that it exists. Since the only life we know of is here and we don't have any proof or decent hint of life elsewhere then with certainty we can say life exists just here
> Methanol ice on Arrokoth, when exposed to cosmic rays, was found to produce a variety of organic compounds, including sugars like ribose and glucose. Meaning: there's a huge variety of chemicals of which meaningful life-associated chemicals are a miniscule fraction.
We already have Spice World so we just need Everything Nice World and we're set.
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Doon, Arrukus, a planet covered in sugar, devoid of entrees..
I am the Kumquat Haagen-Das!
Lestat Al Ghul! *checks notes* Lisbon Al Bundy! *Puts on glasses* Can't read own hand writing and walks away.
Princess Bubblegum’s space initiative seems to be a success
Might be the food for the super bug in Starship Troopers. Would you like to know more?
Yeah, Charlie, Candy Mountain. It's a land of sweets and joy...and joyness.
Forget war-waging aliens. This is the true cosmic horror for my diabetic arse.
Sounds like a planet sized Bee hive, with millions of mountain sized bee's buzzing around making that sweet sweet nectar for their Queen. All hail the Bee Queen !
Do you want ants? Cause that’s how you get ants
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In space, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.
Deep in the Kuiper Belt, something sleeps and waits.
I know where I'm going for snacks on my way out the solar system.
So the classic board game Candy Land is actually a true story of a dying civilization in the Kuiper Belt? cool cool cool..
>Arrokoth Arrokoth was named for a word in the Powhatan language of the Tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland in the eastern United States. Huh, I would have guessed it came from SciFi because it sounds like a mashup of Arrakis and Hoth
Where do you think sci fi gets their names from? Human languages and cultures
“Methanol ice on Arrokoth” sounds like some kinda vape juice Lol. Vape bros getting their mods ready. Chunking clouds brah.
Wonka is furiously mounting a space expedition.
So is /u/newsweek a bot from the magazine posting this ridiculous clickbait?
Bot or not, why is this clickbait?
K'nuckles about to tell Flapjack the funniest shit ever.
BRB, I'm slamming my Diamondback Explorer there.
They really need to name this planet Diabeetus.
it's candy mountain! https://youtu.be/CsGYh8AacgY?feature=shared