Sadly there is a lot of pressure on researchers to promote their work and create headlines like this. And I suspect the timing is not quite coincidental, with Trump pushing to cancel the Roman Space Telescope it seems like a good moment to try and sell the importance of these telescopes...
It seems reasonable that we will eventually find simple life elsewhere. It doesn't seem reasonable to me that life only evolved here. But complex, let alone intelligent, life seems a different question. I think I've mentioned before my crude calculation of the odds of it being 1:10²⁴ (compared to 10²² stars in the visible universe). That said, abiogenesis still seems a deep mystery.
I'm quite sure we will find simple life eventually. We are finding the ingredients for it everywhere, and it seems implausible the conditions for abiogenesis would only be found on Earth and nowhere else. I suspect the real bottleneck is either in going from single cells to multicellular, or in evolving intelligence. After all, Earth would probably still be the planet of the dinosaurs were it not for a random asteroid sixty million years ago.
The conditions, as you say, are common. What has always befuddled me is the transition from chemistry to RNA. Thomas Nagel has written about how this seems to imply teleological forces, because the odds of it happening seem so very, very long. And I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of how it can happen. "Self-replicating" clays seem a stretch.
The thing that strikes me about the dinosaurs is that they were around for 160 million years. Humanity seems likely to kill itself off far short of that, and it bemuses me when people talk about humanity in thousands, let alone millions, of years.
The aliens in a science fiction book I read (Frederik Pohl's Heechee series) said that (in their considerable experience) no species that is both intelligent and hierarchical has ever survived its own intelligence. We seem a good data point in that, although the author obviously had us in mind when he wrote that.
I hope that Nikku Madhusudhan doesn't follow the path of the Harvard professor who sees signs of alien spaceships everywhere.
Sadly there is a lot of pressure on researchers to promote their work and create headlines like this. And I suspect the timing is not quite coincidental, with Trump pushing to cancel the Roman Space Telescope it seems like a good moment to try and sell the importance of these telescopes...
Yes,... between a rock and a hard place... tough to find a balanced way to publicize science.
It seems reasonable that we will eventually find simple life elsewhere. It doesn't seem reasonable to me that life only evolved here. But complex, let alone intelligent, life seems a different question. I think I've mentioned before my crude calculation of the odds of it being 1:10²⁴ (compared to 10²² stars in the visible universe). That said, abiogenesis still seems a deep mystery.
I'm quite sure we will find simple life eventually. We are finding the ingredients for it everywhere, and it seems implausible the conditions for abiogenesis would only be found on Earth and nowhere else. I suspect the real bottleneck is either in going from single cells to multicellular, or in evolving intelligence. After all, Earth would probably still be the planet of the dinosaurs were it not for a random asteroid sixty million years ago.
The conditions, as you say, are common. What has always befuddled me is the transition from chemistry to RNA. Thomas Nagel has written about how this seems to imply teleological forces, because the odds of it happening seem so very, very long. And I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of how it can happen. "Self-replicating" clays seem a stretch.
The thing that strikes me about the dinosaurs is that they were around for 160 million years. Humanity seems likely to kill itself off far short of that, and it bemuses me when people talk about humanity in thousands, let alone millions, of years.
The aliens in a science fiction book I read (Frederik Pohl's Heechee series) said that (in their considerable experience) no species that is both intelligent and hierarchical has ever survived its own intelligence. We seem a good data point in that, although the author obviously had us in mind when he wrote that.
Wow I always wanted to read something like this for a long time actually.
I am satisfied now ☺️