tl;dr Earth is rare, we have no idea why life exists, there are probably no aliens and you should appreciate things (and people/life_ around you a bit more If I'm wrong about some of those things, I'll do a follow up later, but at the moment the evidence is too strong I wanted to believe, but in the end the truth wasn't out there
I don't know if you've already mentioned this (I'm still partway through the video) but there could be another explanation some call the Dark Forest hypothesis. If you haven't, I think it is an interesting idea. For those that don't know, the Dark Forest hypothesis is the idea that there is life out there, but interaction between different species is so dangerous that other civilizations are actually hiding from one another. The Dark Forest hypothesis originates from Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, which is the second book of the trilogy, Three Body Problem. It is a scary idea but I feel like it can explain the Fermi paradox.
I bet our planet is like a seed and can spread life like pollen to other planets. Bacteria can live in space and such so maybe planets can seed each other.
Hi Anton. Have you considered the fact that information about the subject of extraterrestrial life is hidden purposefully from you by the same institutions that should provide it? Have you read the declassified Australian documents titled "Scientific Intelligence - General - Unidentified Flying Objects"? And countless other clues left by the CIA about not only the existence of alien life but also the interactions and contacts made by the government with these entities in order to obtain more advanced technology? Have you listened to US military generals and personnel telling their experiences corroborating these contacts?
We are in blind spot i think. And knowing that not ewen closest planets not ewen moons 3meter deep didnt examined not ewen antarcticas deepths. Ill not be surprised at alll if something extraordinary detected after starting to dig deeper closest places ;p Still ihawe to agree life is important...thats what we are programmed to beliewe at end so woewer sent us nature evolution cosmos universe god or aliens doesnt matter, whatewer itis it thinks so ...so it written on life's main program that info thats it... but second code iss keep searching command or curiosity ;p thats part of life on earths main reasons to live ;p
The rare earth hypothesis isn't getting enough attention. It's not popular because people want aliens to exist. The arguments feel pretty strong to me. Thank you for this episode!
If the probability of a planet having all the conditions found on earth responsible for sustaining and cultivating intelligent life is anything other than 0, it’s a virtual statistical certainty that such a planet exists.
@@hegemon3 just based on the size of the universe (not just the observable universe), it become a near mathematical certainty just based on the number of possible ways to arrange atoms in given area. Not only are there certainly other intelligent life out there, there might be another YOU out there, down to the atom.
Anton is really starting to come into his own and found his neich space content creator spot on youtube. Man's channel is blowing up. I couldn't be happier. Keep up the great work Mr Petrov. ❤
He produces frequent, excellent, high quality content that's thoughtful and well presented. He's been good from the beginning, and he has constantly improved from that excellent start.
I went to see the Brian Cox show last month, and he also spoke how rare it is the planet (and its conditions) that we have. He stated we might be the only intelligent (self-conscious) form of life in the entire galaxy. Which indeed makes what we have even more precious and we should truly take better care of it.
It is crazy how rare our solar system is and you nailed everything I've been mentioning for years. The large moon on a terrestrial planet alone is a big factor.
@@iantait309 you are right and as Anton pointed out there are so many factors providing us the chance to become ourselves on earth. I just meant that a large moon on a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of a g type star alone is so rare were the only case of it weve ever seen. That's just one thing of many ♡
@@lebronzejames Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all have magnetic fields much stronger than that of the Earth. Mars once had a magnetic field, Venus has an induced magnetic field, and Earth's won't be around forever. In a billion years Earth will end up like Mars as the core stops turning, and the sun will have swollen up making Earth completely uninhabitable anyway. We're overdue a magnetic field flip which might spell disaster for a technologically aged Earth with satellites and power grids at stake. Currently the field has lost more than 30% of it's strength over the last 200 years. We mustn't cherry pick unique things and then declare that without these things there would be no life. We can't draw any conclusions as to what is or is not required as we only have one planet as a case study. For all we know life began on Earth in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean where it doesn't matter if Earth has a magnetic shield, and we don't really know if it's an important factor anyway simply because we've evolved on a planet with a magnetic field so our DNA didn't evolve to adapt to self repair with regard to charged particles and high energy photons. For all we know, Earth life might be particularly fragile and the magnetic field hindered us, because we never evolved to deal with energetic photons impacting our DNA, making space exploration difficult for the rare species who's planets have self-generated or inducted magnetic fields.
Is it really rare though or is it more likely that we are making scientific hypothesis's on very limited knowledge and information?.. i like to think if our solar system was say 50 light years away, using our same techniques, how much of our solar system would we have knowledge of? Mercury no, venus maybe, earth yes, mars yes, Jupiter maybe saturn no. How many planets and moons do we have no idea of in each system, then add to the fact that almost every month a new paper comes out about a distant star and its unexplained properties. Life appears to be alot more versatile than we give credit for. What is the bet that right now somewhere in the universe there is an anton living on a planet that has no moon, and he just made a Zoutube video about how impossible life would be on a planet with a moon and thus not having an unstable tilt
Wow! That 1970's image of a blackhole done via computer was impressive and I have never seen before out of all the years I've been watching these kinds of videos. Yeah, it was 40+ yrs ago and look what we know and can do now.... But we never would have gotten to this point without those amazing people and the willingness to keep going even if no one believed them and things like that. Thank you everyone who pushes to learn new things and providing ways for people like me to learn new things and usually even able to understand complex ideas quite easily through great teaching and using the tools now available! 🍻🌎❤️🌮🎶🚀
@@aurelienyonrac I can't even imagine how smart they probably really are/were and simply didn't have ways of keeping a record of everything they either knew or had ideas about and not so much limited in technology but inability to communicate or transfer knowledge/information to others unless literally you could walk and talk to directly. Just insane how easy we can access literally almost anything or anyone from anywhere and don't even have to think about it or even remember using an actual corded phone and long distance fees. Lol 🍻🌎❤️🌮🎶🚀
@@aurelienyonrac who did not understand it?? Which Earth am I on? I think there are only two Earths out of all the Earths where the humans get stuck with words until robots... Can you correct me if I am wrong? I am willing to listen to a fresh opinion.
@@jedison2441 nope. My imagining is not for things my Math uses to sort The History™️ inside skull. Is your brain in word mode or math mode? I can try to translate. Thank you for sharing.
No, that's not true. The odds are against even that. Run the math. Even a protein folding from amino acids is a 1x10^33 chance. There aren't enough suitable planets or time for that to have occured by chance, let alone life, let alone intelligence, let alone self awareness. Go crunch some numbers with a million monkeys on a million typwriters. Or wait until a hurricane assembles an airplane.
But we aren’t the most rare thing. Life could be not that rare. It could be rare still. But since the universe is infinite there is technically infinite life
I appreciate all you do and your Outlook on life. With the tragedy you have been through and the way you push through and have such a positive attitude inspires me to lead a more fulfilling life. Thank you for everything especially the way you can communicate complex ideas to a lay person like me, I love your content!
Similar sentiment here. Having a bad time currently with a neighbour from every hell imaginable and difficult to think about anything else as we try to gather evidence. I got 20 minutes of inner peace here and a reminder that the problem pales by comparison, and that there are lots of wonderful people in the world.
@@paulembleton1733 hope things get better for you I have been having neighbor problems as well it's the worst. It makes you feel helpless like there's nothing you can do or say to make them see things from your point of view. The worst is I think they do see my point of view they just do not care enough to respect it.
I used to have the X-files poster until my (late) mom took it down one day and didn't tell me about it. I was so mad at her when I found out but in the end realized that... I didn't believe anymore This was back in early 2000s when X-Files was in its prime and I was just starting to explore astrobiology as an actual science
@@whatdamath that is very introspective of you to offer. I really do appreciate the thought you put into that. I 🪚 the future and I am not [all] 🫥 there. I might have found a hack to integrate universal acceptance into [re]scheduling 🔭 time. Not time, time. Learning time, time. It needs a handful of atomic ninjas to light the fuse. 🕯️ 🥷⚛️🤝
@@whatdamath A deep Reset is needed if the humans continue to refuse sufficient Wealth distribution that ensures the dignified existence of every citizen.
The more we learn, the more we realize that we don’t know. I think that is a key thing to keep in mind when making proclamations about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
THINGS MODERN SCIENCE DOES NOT APPARENTLY KNOW: (copy and paste from my files): Consider the following: a. Numbers: Modern science does not even know how numbers and certain mathematical constants exist for math to do what math does. (And nobody as of yet has been able to show me how numbers and certain mathematical constants can come from the Standard Model Of Particle Physics). b. Space: Modern science does not even know what 'space' actually is nor how it could actually warp and expand. c. Time: Modern science does not even know what 'time' actually is nor how it could actually warp and vary. d. Gravity: Modern science does not even know what 'gravity' actually is nor how gravity actually does what it appears to do. And for those who claim that 'gravity' is matter warping the fabric of spacetime, see 'b' and 'c' above. e. Speed of Light: 'Speed', distance divided by time, distance being two points in space with space between those two points. But yet, here again, modern science does not even know what space and time actually are that makes up 'speed' and they also claim that space can warp and expand and time can warp and vary, so how could they truly know even what the speed of light actually is that they utilize in many of the formulas? Speed of light should also warp, expand and vary depending upon what space and time it was in. And if the speed of light can warp, expand and vary in space and time, how then do far away astronomical observations actually work that are based upon light and the speed of light that could warp, expand and vary in actual reality?
QUESTIONS: PHOTONS: (copy and paste from my files): A photon is usually depicted in a sine wave pattern with the 'e' and 'm' energy fields 90 degrees to each other. The 'e' and 'm' energy fields go out together and come back in together, over and over and over, doing so even across the vast universe as far as we can see. Where does the energy in the energy fields go when both the 'e' and 'm' energy fields go to zero? And what causes the 'e' and 'm' energy fields to come back to 'full' from zero? Over and over again over vast distances.
Excellent, Anton! How to address very serious points with clarity but without pathos - throw in a tad of goofiness, and you have a top-notch, convincing bases of a dozen possible discussions. Kudos!
Scientists keep ignoring the Mountain of anecdotal and physical evidence that Aliens have been here many times. Ask Mario Wood about encounter at a Nuke Base, Commander Fravor and the Tic-tac UFO, the USS Nimitz encounters, and much more. The Fermi paradox has never held.
@@whatdamath to me, goofiness is the celebration of just how absurd existence is. How is it that all these factors exist in a just such a way that allows us to be aware of that we are made of up of atoms. Apparently when atoms get together in just the right way, they become aware of themselves. How goofy is that?
Only problem is that all we have discovered so far accounts for virtually nothing at the ridiculous scale of our universe. Thanks for all the work you do to communicate the latest scientific discoveries to us all. I so appreciate it!
Yeah, but if you sample 1000 people in a study, you can find statistically significant results that draw conclusions for the other 8 billion people. The catch here is this... let's say you used a sample of 1000... you will not find things that are really rare. Only big picture trends. So with that, we can assume that earth definitely is "rare" but we truly have zero idea of how rare because of what you said. We haven't seen enough. We could be as rare as one per galaxy, one in the whole universe! Or 1 in 1000 per galaxy. It's so unclear...
That is an intense amount of "if's"... thanks for the perspective Anton... you rock! Maybe theres only a planet with intelligence every couple of galaxies, and it will take another billion years for each to populate it's own... and then, maybe we'll discover each other? time/space is something we think of myopically... and maybe it will take a long long time for humans to figure this out. Let's cherish what we know... thanks for the perspective and heart Anton.
The more I learn about earth, the more unique it seems to be. I'm not saying life cannot be elsewhere, but earth seems to be perfect for so many reasons... a relatively stable start (most stars are red and unstable), magnetosphere, tectonic plates, moon to keep its movements stable, water and carbon are abundant for life, the fact phosphorus is rare in this universe but vital for life as we know it and it is abundant on earth, etc.
@@aidangattinger8975 I i used to often fall back on this thought process but in reality, most of these conditions are significant bc they all represent stability in one form or another. even a theoretical entirely foreign form of life made thru processes & out of stuff that we would consider completely foreign to our concept of life, would still require stability to not get wiped out, due to the entropic principle. for something to become more complex & ordered over time it needs to be lucky enough to ‘dodge’ for lack of a better word matter’s natural tendency to kind of just fall apart and become chaotic, & an incredibly lucky chain of events needs to play out in which things randomly become… not-random, over time, if that makes sense. eventually life created an system to resist entropy & self-sustain but no matter how foreign another form of life may be, there’s no skirting around the initial need for immeasurable amounts of luck
@@zephyramethyst9455 1) the evidence (lack of life as far as we can see in the solar system and intelligent life in the milky way) suggests that, no, life can't exist anywhere. 2) scientists argue that life choosing carbon as building blocks isn't random or simply because it's available on earth. Carbon has many advantages in chemistry that the other elements don't have. I don't remember the details, but many RU-vid science educators made videos about it. 3) like what @Zephyer said, any complex life needs stability, energy, and diversity of environments to achieve complexity. If conditions never change across time and space on a planet or a moon, then simple life wouldn't need to evolve to adapt, fill niches, or compete
Earth as a cosmological oddity is only a very small part of the high strangeness of the emergence of humans on Earth. The long and winding chain of ecological events, starting with the emergence of the first life forms on the planet, single celled organisms that ate CO2 and produced O2, the first 'environmental catastrophe' that went on for millions of years and would have eventually resulted in its own demise if organisms that use O2 with carbon to power them hadn't somehow emerged (as odd and unusual an event as the emergence of the very first life forms) and countless additional steps in the emergence of simple cells organizing into complex systems, on to little things like the emergence of flowering plants that enabled plants to spread inland from what had been shoreline habitats at best and provided concentrated fuel contained in seeds for the complex self-propelled life forms to spread out on dry land. Then there's things like the extinction of the dinosaurs, without which mammals wouldn't have stood a chance, be nothing more than a grab-and-go order of french-fries to the major predators. Then there's the emergence of the very strange set of circumstances which made for larger brains in some ape-like creatures, something that is very energy costly to such an extent that it's not usually an adaptive advantage. Then there's the really big twist in our own development, the emergence of an unusual drying period about 13,000 years ago that compelled groups of humans around the world to gather around dwindling water resources and develop far more complexly organized societies and get much more into farming (that's all only about 13,000 years old). Our present technological level we take for granted, as if it had always been there, but what we have today is little more than 100 years old (things seriously changed with the emergence of gas powered engines and cheap and abundant electricity). A hundred years is nothing, for all intents and purposes, even we don't exist yet in the Universe. So, how can we expect 'intelligent life' to exist anywhere else? Taking all these really extraordinary conditions into account, the odds of anything even remotely like either the Earth or us existing anywhere else in the universe is an extremely remote possibility. This planet and every life on it is insanely precious. Well, i guess only to life forms, nothing else seems really to give a hoot.
Amazing you made this video Anton, I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately. Esp how our existence depends on so many specific factors coalesced in exactly the way that allows us to exist.. like a giant planetary-galactic life form!
Perhaps we will, one day, discover something as unique and rare as ourselves but not like us at all. Something utterly different but as complex and interesting as intelligent life. Of course, I have no idea what that might be. Thanks, Anton. I'm going to rewatch the earlier rare earth hypothesis video you mentioned. See you tomorrow.
Really enjoyed this one! I lean toward the "we are not alone" crowd. There's just too many chances that SOME type of living things are out out there. Somewhere.
I'm in agreement with you. I've never really believed that until recently. Suddenly I'm aware that we're probably not alone. Perhaps beings billions more advanced seeded us? It opens up so many more questions; how many species are out there? Did they find a way to bend space/time? What's under the water? What is on the back side of the moon?
@@panzrok8701 Yeah that may be the case w/evolved intelligent beings. Few and, very, far between. But, this planet teems w/life at all levels. And I'd also bet we find lesser life forms, bacteria, plant life, aquatic life, to be so common that virtually any planet that can support them will have them in some form.
You really are exceptionally talented at describing ideas within a contextual framework. It enables us to get a feel for work being done in cosmology and astrophysics without requiring us to have a particular qualification needed to unpack the implications ourselves. In other words thank you for helping us understand a little bit more.
three things that don't get talked about much: There is a rather large difference between being able to support life and getting life going. That first step is hard. Once life is there what is required for it to survive? We think we know but Earth has changed a lot and we have seen life survive in a wide variety conditions from very hot and toxic to cold and airless. The other thing people seem to forget is life's way of changing the planet. Earth is radically different even now from when life began. It has changed so much that the life that began on Earth could not survive today and today's life would not survive the Earth that life started on. I would find it interesting to see what would happen to Venus if a good dose of life inoculated it. Where would it be in 100 years, or a thousand? (or even just 10 years) When searching for life, what really should we be looking for?
If you just inject Earth life onto Venus, it would die instantly. You stated it correctly: Earth life changed the planet and changed itself also, and is pretty accurately adapted to just Earth. Perhaps Mars would be a better candidate for your experiment.
@@mikolajtrzeciecki1188 Yes, it would have to be slowly, over some generations (which for some life might measured in minutes). acclimatized. Mars might be better but I think it would be the same thing, a slow acclimation. My choice of Venus has to do with it being a better place for humans with a successful terraform. Mars will always have a lack of gravity. Mind you, Venus may have unsolvable problems too. On Mars, no matter the climate outside, people will be living in artificial gravity habitats because people want their children to be able to go to "good" universities. Some people might decide to leave these habitats but I am sure that the "suits" will not. Any political figure will want to be seen as strong in any negotiation, sitting in a wheel chair makes that difficult.
As someone who was old enough to read “Rare Earth” when it came out: couple it with Nick Lane’s “The Vital Question,” which explains the gobsmacking complexity of eukaryotes when compared to prokaryotic cells, and the Fermi “paradox” is no paradox. To boot, making multicellular life requires a very complex sequence of conditions to allow such biochemically improbable cells to evolve, and it’s a severe bottleneck on multicellular life, let alone animal life, let alone *intelligent* animal life. Ward and Brownlee also concluded that when we find life out there it will be almost all microbes (which are less improbable), and that was way before Lane looked at the biophysics of eukaryotic cells. As always, Anton, you are an amazing educator and wonderful person. You are a gift to us. Thank you!
By the same logic, we know Corvettes absolutely cannot exist. There are no conditions anywhere that can allow all of the individual atoms to all jump together all at once from mineral ores, and all in a completely functional structure, ready to drive. But wait. What if something slightly less complex than a Corvette existed before a Corvette? What if before that, something else even less complex existed? If we give time for all of the individual steps to happen, the amount of time required could be millions (Doctor Evil) or billions of years. ...
The only problem with this, is that most of the conditions are set to our standards, to the life we know, however there could exist such exotic lifeforms, we have no idea about, and most of these conditions are already wrong.
Yeah, it's like being amazed how perfectly suited to camels deserts are. Many environments that are very un-earthlike could be very capable of evolving life that is very un-earthlike. I strongly suspect that there are many planets out there that are MORE suited to life in general than Earth (e.g. has resources and environmental stability that surpass Earth), possibly by a margin we can scarcely imagine.
Well we don't know if life can exist in more exotic conditions and in a more exotic configuration itself, so why search for something that might not exist at all, when we can search for something that we know can and does exist.
@@Alister222222 Well, that's some wildly vague and desperately reaching conjecture. Thank you. Are you imagining that planets hit by constant coronal mass ejections and asteroids are hospitable to life by a "margin we can scarcely imagine"? I think most everyone understands that we're talking about intelligent life with off-planet potential. The needs of such lifeforms are pretty well understood. Are you imagining entities made of ice or lava?
@@mastpg There are a lot of circumstances that life obviously can't live in, but there's no way you can say that Earth is the only place life could ever live ever.
Anton, I think this is one of your best videos yet. You brought up most of the main variables that would support a rare Earth hypothesis. I'm sure there are more variables that we may not realize yet, but just the ones you brought up is enough to support the rare Earth hypothesis. But I will still hold on to a hope for other complex life forms in other systems. Well, a hope for a more peaceful civilization on other worlds.
I love your treatment of the anthropic principal - it seems to me to be a well reasoned and accurate description of the situation. I was actually pleasantly surprise to see the discussion about the connections to faith and belief that can come with this topic. As a person of faith myself, thank you for this video.
Wonderful video, Anton. It seems hard to believe that in the vastness of the observable universe no other planet developed that would be suitable for the emergence of complex life, or any form of biological life. As unusual or uncommon as the earth perhaps is, it would seem that even such a long shot must have occurred elsewhere in some similar fashion. But maybe not. If that's the case, how sad. I think we'd all like to believe that life is abundant in the cosmos, to know that we're not alone.
Our current best theory of universe says speed of light is the absolute speed limit. Even though it is not fully proven that there is no way around it, the chances are it is true. And with this single, reasonable assumption, it is entirely expected that we don’t see aliens.
@@truerandomchannel "allows" means that Einstein's field equations have a lot of resolutions. Some of them allows such curvatures, others describe our universe. There isn't necessarily an intersection of the two. That's what I meant by that it is not fully proven that it is impossible, but likely. Also there is no practical application of Alcubierre drive, as you need FTL information transfer BEFORE you start it.
The anthropic principle doesn't solve the fine-tuning problem unless you combine it with a multiverse. But if you think the multiverse is too speculative to bank on, you really can't invoke the anthropic principle to explain fine-tuning.
I disagree. Like Anton said, the anthropic principle can be applied to parts of our own universe, the idea being that we will only find ourselves in a place where we CAN exist, even if the set of conditions is very rare within our universe. With so many trillions of stars, the chances that some rare conditions exist somewhere can be non-zero.
to me it appears the anthropic principle was/is a big funding marketing stunt. Almost every spot in the entire universe is absolutely hostile to life as we know it. Even if we'd find life in every system of the milky way tomorrow there is still so few life at every location in space that we could likewise say there is almost none at all. Even on earth at every second radiation, viruses catastrophes etc. threaten to erase our life. If the universe is "fine tuned" for life it is astronomically (!) ineffective in that regard.
@@johnskujins8870 I agree with that. The anthropic principle can explain why we find ourselves on a habitable planet instead of an uninhabitable planet. The reason the anthropic principle works in this case is because there are trillions of planets. But what I was talking about is the fine-tuning of the constants of the universe. Unless there are other universes with different constants, the anthropic principle can't be invoked to explain the fine-tuning of the constants in our universe.
@@philochristos Right, I see that you were referring to the fine tuning of physical constants, which does go along with the multiverse idea, rather than the fine tuning of conditions on Earth. Still, we could only find ourselves in a universe like the one we are in, with its constants of nature, and in a place within that universe where we were allowed to form on a planet. I know I just invoked the multiverse in this reasoning but it's hard to get away from. I do agree with you after all.
Nicely said Anton. Carpe diem. I don't believe we even need the multiverse hypothesis if we accept this simple idea. When the universe came into existence, it was a roll of the near infinitely sided dice. It happened to land on 1/137 which seems to give us life:) The dice may have been rolled an infinite number of times and only landed on life once. Keep up the great content holmes:)
One of the things that has always bothered me about the Fermi Paradox is that it does not seem to consider time... The universe has been around for more or less 13.8 Billion years (supposedly) so a lot of alien forms could have come and gone over that time. I really do like your analysis of what goes into making life possible, as we know it.
The universe is relatively young compared to its projected life span. Moreover, the “metals” necessary to make life possible only appeared in suffient abundance after the 3rd or 4th generation of stars. Life may be rare now, but it could be much more abundant across the universe a few billion years in the future.
Time as we think of it is a false understanding. It doesn't dive deep enough into what is actually happening. It's great for telling a story but it's just part of the unfinished equation.
Possibly, there's also another possible factor such that having the stability to evolve to a point where you can transmit a coherent signal could be extremely rare, other civilisations may not have the selective pressures that would interest them in long distance communication, or if they're like dolphins they could be intelligent but lack the means or body structure to manipulate their environment to build structures. In this way intelligent life could be extremely common, but what is rare are opposable thumbs or grasping and articulating appendages.
I think the opening to almost every Fermi Paradox discussion I've ever heard is even if Earth is rare there are so many galaxies and stars that that would mean billions of them... I think your audiences had that discussion once or twice
@Cancer McAids This makes a lot of sense to me. I think we also have the unfortunate fate of perhaps being the "first" to exist, at least intelligently enough to leave the planet.
Its also worth noting that we have only observed a fraction of a percent of the universe in any amount of detail. It's not like we know of every G-type star in our galaxy, let alone the billions of other galaxies. So while everything seems to be EXTREMELEY rare, its like picking a blue jelly bean out of a jar of 100. Then picking another jelly bean, and when its not blue, saying "Wow, that first blue jelly bean must have been really special".
You are assuming everywhere is the same as us. Which is obviously not the case. Otherwsie you would have life on the moon, on Mars or literally everywhere. I would assume simple life to be common, but complex to be extremely rare and intelligence like us is only one.
@@edwardso8903 no....I'm not assuming everywhere is like us. And nothing I said would indicate that life should be on the moon lol The problem with assuming we are the only intelligence in the universe is exactly what I said. We haven't examined enough of the universe to make that assumption. It's like pulling 3 jelly beans out of a jar of hundreds, and since only one of the three is blue, you assume it's the only blue jelly bean in the jar. You don't seem to understand the scale of the universe, and how little we have actually examined.
Of course millions of intelligent aliens are all over the place. We just don’t overlap with them closely enough in spacetime. It’s a big universe. Trillions of galaxies!
Doubt it. Another good book on the topic is "THE PRIVILEGED PLANET". I'm not religious, so despite the authors being religious, their arguments were very very persuasive. I recommend it.
TayZonday: “Of course millions of intelligent aliens are all over the place. We just don't overlap with them closely enough in spacetime. It's a big universe. Trillions of galaxies!” It’s a fun idea, and since my retirement from a technical field, I’ve taken to writing science fiction, where alien civilizations are a staple item. But as the late physicist Richard Feynman said “Science is the culture of doubt.” Life would have to arise spontaneously throughout these galaxies; what is the source of biological information in DNA? I pose this question to those who feel life must have happened spontaneously, but I never receive a coherent answer. Evolution is not the solution, as the definition of evolution is natural selection of random genetic mutation, which is not a source of biological instructions but rather elimination, specifically of biological instructions that are not well-suited to the survival of the specimen/species. In every instance, we find that instructions have a source: a mind, a consciousness. This isn’t a proposition of “If you can’t explain it, it must be God“ but rather, how do you explain the origin of the biological instructions in DNA apart from a consciousness? I don’t require an answer; this is something for you to consider for yourself. Have a good day.
Anton! I am deeply grateful for you discussing this topic! The book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe really opened my eyes. Carl Sagan said back in the 1980s that our solar system was a "typical" one, which isnt true just by looking at all the exoplanets we have discovered. Most stars in our galaxy are red dwarves (70%). Also, most star systems have wildly elliptical gas giant orbits which would throw out of the star system any smaller rocky planets. Your idea that the Earth is just incredibly SUPER lucky to have life just doesnt fly IMO. There are over 70 critical factors for life to exist on Earth, and you just listed many of them, so many that it just reinforced the idea behind the book, Rare Earth. Thanks again for this most excellent video!
As huge as the universe is there has to be intelligent life somewhere. Chances are they are just so far away that there has been no contact as of yet. Thank you for video, Anton, stay wonderful!!!
Simple life should be common, but for a technological civilization to emerge, a large number of rare conditions are needed, perhaps once every trillions of planets.
Anton, the more I watch your content, the more it strikes me that in time you could well be Carl Sagan's successor. Fascinating content as always. Delivered with balance, intelligence, humility and a natural charisma. My thought on this particular subject: Perhaps different variables of temperature, magnetism, chemistry etc. may perhaps produce and evolve a completely different form of life that we may not yet be able to recognise. It could be that our expectations and margins are much too precise and too limiting.
I like to think as the human race stretches out across the known universe and discovers more of it we will find life after all, we have only been here for a blink of an eye in the grand time scale of things I believe the dinosaur where here for longer than we have been 🧐
That's the strangest part though, dinosaurs most likely (the bigger ones) existed way longer than us, yet they never evolved to build magnificent things like our species can do. With that much time on your hands on this planet you would think that dinosaurs would have been be able to create laser guns then before meteorites came and destroyed most of them. *Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago (at the end of the Cretaceous Period), after living on Earth for about 165 million years* But they never had the evolved mind to build an airplane. Isn't that strange though?
If you are talking about intelligent life, then this is logical if you think about the number of incredible conditions required for this. Perhaps once every trillions of planets.
There is also the concept of Great Filter where life starts as simple (e.g. prokaryotic), and remains so on other planets ... On Earth, a very rare event happened that lead to the rise of complex life. One cell engulfed another cell, and they symbiotically started eukaryotes. The engulfed cell was a bacteria (no nucleus, no organelles), and it became the mitochondria in all plants, animals and fungi (unicellular and multicellular). The engulfing cell was most likely an Archean. Complex multicellular life is not possible without the above symbiosis. The above event happened only once in 4 billion years of life. So complex life is quite rare. Simple life, as in bacteria, can be common.
There is also the possibility that the "great filter" is still ahead of us. In order to sustain larger group sizes, most (allistic) people have a deference to authority. The problem with this is that the gain in group complexity may be short-lived: as deference to authority takes precedence over stewarding the biosphere. Autistic people like Grata Thunberg have raised the alarm: but it remains to be seen if Capitalism will be dismantled/mitigated before it is too late. Even if climate change does not kill us off directly: the mass migrations it causes may trigger a nuclear exchange, decimating life on the the planet.
Have you read "Rare Earth'? If not, I highly recommend it. It's not enough that the conditions for life exist. They must consistently exist for a continuous period long enough for life to evolve. Based on our sample size N=1, we can conclude that it seems that 'simple life' takes at least several hundred million years, but metazoans, complex life, seems to take several billion. That's quite a lengthy period for such rare conditions to persist, it seems. Ward and Brownlee cover this aspect of the question quite well.
@@jamesphillips2285 There is nothing that precludes that there is more than one Great Filters, and that some may precede us and others are yet to come. The eukaryote emergence by engulfment is something we know happened once and in the distant past, and never happened again.
Thank you Anton, big time fan here. You really provide the best objective insights on space topics on RU-vid. I'm really interested if you can provide your detailed objective analysis on the crazy hypothesis by Lee Smolin on "Cosmological Evolution". I've read his book "Life of the Cosmos", and he has a very crazy proposition, but it seems to beautifully fit and answers a lot of open questions in Cosmology. I believe these hypothesis like"Cosmological Natural Selection" and "Black Hole Evolution" deserve more attention.
Excellent, balanced video. My problem with the rare earth hypothesis is that it is based on assumptions that life must evolve only under certain conditions, which our solar system happily possesses. We simply do not have enough information to conclude that we are alone, in my opinion. But I like the conclusion of the video: we should treasure what we have.
If we are alone, and already special and unique enough... I like what Carl said "The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space"
I also like the idea in _Contact_ that discovering a galaxy or galaxies with millions of inhabited worlds and technological civilizations cooperating with each other on galactic and inter-galactic projects makes our rivalries, disagreements and wars seem so petty and juvenile. "They've persuaded us that we'll be safe if only we spend all our wealth so everybody on Earth can be killed in a moment - when the governments decide the time has come." -Carl Sagan's Contact
If the universe is that specific about creating conciseness, love/ hate and experiences, we seem to be quite special. Thanks for reminding me! Love you.
Wow, such a high quality analysis. This should convince anyone of our own humanity, and people should see the value of space exploration after this. We’re rare and we need consider how fragile we are to begin with.
Dear Anton. With irrefutable good reason, I will here stipulate the fact that NO ONE on this planet now, and NO ONE who has ever been present on this planet, could so-perfectly, so-coherently and so-comprehensively conceive and compose the 20-minute explanatory exploration of scientific perspectives which you did in the video above. NO ONE!!!!! You, Anton, are a once-in-all-time phenomenon. ONCE in ALL time. You are a magnificent phenomenon, my dear friend. Yes, you ARE magnificent. SINGULARLY MAGNIFICENT! With irrefutable good reason, that fact is here stipulated, for now, and for all time yet to be. ~ Thank you, Anton.
i argue something else - if life can only exist in these extreme conditions, the very fact that we exists makes it definite that it happens for us, so we aren’t entirely lucky, though we are still extremely unique
"despite what you may have heard from other youtube channels or other media, we still haven't found anything anywhere." You almost got me. I almost removed my tinfoil hat. Not today.
I think people should also consider the idea that it is possible that in our galaxy (which is probably the only region we can ever be in contact with) there could be a few intelligent species. This doesn't violate the fermi paradox because it is not necessarily true that these other species are expansionist enough for us to see them already. Of course, the chances that none of them are expansionist lowers a lot when you raise the number of intelligent species. It could be that it is not all obvious that rapid expansion is the route most intelligent species take, which means that there could be some intelligent species without any of them spreading throughout the whole galaxy.
The amount of unkwon factors is yet too high for any proper conclusions. If there is life there could be several factors of destroying itself if its intelligent enough(which we could achieve with our useless nuclear arsenal ) or life like ours isn't actually aware its just more complex instincts etc.
How many other serious science channels can you find that talk serious science and astrophysics, while simultaneously showing Lego Star Wars and trying to hum the X-Files theme song? Hello wonderful content creator.
I've been thinking about this a great deal lately and it's interesting how much belief plays a part in what people think. People start with their desired outcome and work backward from there it seems.
I wish Anton was on Spotify! RU-vid has gotten out of hand with these adds, cant even watch an episode of WhatdaMath without seeing 6 different adds some of which are an hour long and will continue to play if you dont skip them. Makes listening to Anton at work nearly impossible. 😡 WhatdaMath Spotify 2023! 😂
Over one million subscribers, only 47,000 views, 5,000 likes, 947 comments. Speaks volumes about society's attention span, and never committing to anything interesting and educational before becoming bored and moving on.
You might have 💫 the power to change 💫 some of that. Whenever it was when you felt clarity about the best way to extend the human experiment is a moment you can commit to memory and keep replaying. Your dog will know you both are in a happy zen place and your buddy will be able to follow your commands intuitively. If you replay how you ~felt~. Not what you "remember." There is a *snap* in all of nature where [magic|math] lives. If you are confident that your buddy is _your_ puppy you can believe every word I said is sincere. Everything offered is calculated and adheres to a code. I would wager that if you and your buddy could make believe the smartest thing to do sometimes is scout out the best view, you can sense what is right or wrong and just vibe out with your favorite music. 💓
When I was young I used to believe in ufos, now I’m older and better educated I now believe that the amount of steps needed to support complex life make it not as common as we thought. They may be times when other life did and can exist but it will be very spread out in distance and time. A very good critical analysis Anton. I fully agree with you in regard to not believing without evidence. Religion relies on faith, whereas science relies on actual evidence. T.
