tristynalxander

Must just be the algorithms deciding it’s the new thing I’m interested in.

Is it just me / my-algorithm or is there a ton being done on exoplanets recently?

That’s way smaller than I thought – or perhaps space is just way bigger than I thought.

I’m biased as a biologist, but I don’t think extraterrestrials will reach out to humanity until we’ve solved both global peace and biological immortality (the second being much easier and closer than scifi makes it seem and likely a prerequisite for the first). Until we have a population that’s basically capable of responsibly managing themselves, I think humanity looks like infants or maybe teens throwing tantrums. Unstable, unreliable, and in need of the time to work itself out.

That’s assuming of-course that they’re near by in the first place, which is unknown.

Unfortunately, I think this is kinda predictable. You can’t control your genetics, but I think that’s the point of these judgements. I don’t like it or agree with it, but people are almost always judging people based on sexual selection criteria. There isn’t a rational mechanistic logic there. It’s just being attractive vaguely correlates with other positive traits (implied genes). Maybe you’re attractive because you just don’t get fat, those are good genes. Maybe you’re attractive because you have great self control, those are good genes* (that’s questionable, but that’s the “logic”). People aren’t judging you based on what you did with the hand you were dealt they’re judging you based on the hand you were dealt. It’s like when guys dislike knowing girls wear make-up, despite being attracted almost exclusively to make-up wearing girls. Make-up is “cheating” their evolutionary intuition, so they dislike it. GLP-1 drugs similarly cheat people’s evolutionary intuition. It’s shallow and stupid, but I think that’s the ultimate basis of the judgement.

So, how long until antimatter missiles?

I admit that the ionic liquids are an interesting concept for strange life. That said, most the ones they have look far too complex to have formed by any natural process in any meaningful amount, and anything that could form naturally doesn’t seem likely to have good a temperature range for compatible polymers. Maybe there’s something weird I’m missing (something that increases the NH3 liquid range and doesn’t react with siloconates or something crazy like that), but I’d be extremely skeptical of life without water.

I’'m a molecular biologist, so this is tangentially related to my field. I think there’s even odds life originated on mars then hopped to earth. NASA has been laying the ground work for a sample return mission for a while now to prove this one way or the other, but apparently the evidence has been mounting for decades.

It’ll be pretty easy to tell once they get some uncontaminated mars rocks. While a lot of life works the way it does because it has to or because it’s optimal for evolution, there’s no accounting for chirality in amino acids (though amino acids in general are arguably inevitable) and nucleic acids are also probably unique to our form of life – at least I haven’t heard or thought of a reason nucleic acids specifically (not some other folding semi-dimer molecule) would be inevitable. There’s also certain amino acid side chains that seem unlikely to be shared; though, unshared side chains would mean little.

It’d actually be a bit sad if life originated on mars as people would suddenly be a lot more interested in searching the stars for life, but the chances of finding it would dramatically drop as a single panspermia event would strongly suggest that complex life requires much more time to evolve most planets are habitable lifespan. I suppose an optimist could argue that humanity is early and/or lucky.