GinohnNews! 2005 08 31

E: You can just ignore this if you're not really interested but I was surfing from your heap and I thought:

One of the arguments for extraterrestrial sources of earth life seems to be that there wasn't enough time (1 or 2 billion years) for the first life to arise. This argument makes no sense to me at all, unless you extend the age of the universe much longer than the 14 or 15b often mentioned. I mean, life would have to originate somewhere, then spread millions of lightyears? (Unless you make life ubiquitous which seems to be too weird to me.) How do these people propose that life travels so quickly?

J: Maybe I haven't had enough coffee today but I can't quite understand what you're saying. Are they saying there wasn't enough time in Earth's first couple Gy? Oh, wait. I get it. I get what you're saying now. I could just erase this whole paragraph but I'm not gonna.

So anyhow, where was I? Oh yes, I can see your point. I, however, take a middle ground. I suspect that life in the universe, given the same chemical elements and non-locality of physical laws, _is_ ubiquitous, and arrives on planets through (sometimes) emergent properties _and_ (sometimes) random interplanetary seeding. Latest evidence involving origins of life on Earth show that microbial life could have had several starts, followed by all-encompassing worldwide extinctions.

I wouldn't be surprised if someday in the future we found some sort of microbial life--perhaps spores, or fossils--in space, among the comets and dust. (I don't know about that Martian meteorite. Sounds a bit flakey to me.) Crazy Freddy Hoyle thought some viral outbreaks were simply caused by the earth passing through infected cometary dust, and that the viruses rained down upon us. He also had a similar theory involving insects, but hey, he was nuts. Nice to have such people around, though. I guess interstellar seeding theories correspond best with his Steady State Theory (SST) of the universe.

Which gives me this thought: Stipulating (for just this paragraph) that SST is correct and that the universe has existed for trillions of eons, wouldn't some species of life have enough time to evolve into massively intelligent beings capable of god-like powers? Wouldn't lots of these kinds of creatures stop by planet Earth (and every other planet) almost daily? Anyhow, that's my thought experiment that tears SST apart.

Maybe I _have_ had too much coffee.

I wanted to clarify that I didn't mean ubiquitous in the strict sense; I meant that I think life has a good chance of appearing in lots of star systems, given enough time and money-- er, materials. Monkeys and typewriters are most likely unique to our planet, and the nearest star system that supports life may be a thousand light years (or a million _years_) away but that's just peanuts to spacetime. I also think that while interplanetary (within a star system) seeding is possible, _interstellar_ seeding is nigh impossible.

E: The guy from SETI Institute on the Skepticality podcast today (it's an okay podcast - a work in progress I guess) said that the combined SETI efforts have only searched a teeny weeny part ofthe sky anyway. So I guess it's not time to give up yet.

But what if there is lots of unintelligent life out there that just happens to have radio-signal mating calls??

I get the big picture about the seeding now. I tend to agree with you about interstellar seeding, except maybe when the stars are part of the same system and, say, one blows up, shooting DNA to the others... could happen.