So you know the Great Filter, right?
It’s what happens when you look up at the stars and ask “Where the fuck is everyone”.
There are so many planets out there, yet it’s radio silent. The intelligent life to planet ratio is really, bad. So far we’re the only ones.
You gotta ask, why?
Enter, the Great Filter. Something, at some point in the pipeline, prevents planets from developing and maintaining intelligent life capable of electromagnetic communication.
We don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a quirk of chemistry that makes the chance of multicellular life forming ridiculously low. Maybe it’s a quirk of biology that makes sapience incredibly rare. Maybe it’s a hyper intelligent space worm that eats any civilisation that makes too much noise. Maybe it’s runaway climate change.
The thing is, we really don’t want to be on the wrong side of that filter, because that suggests that an imminent demise is in our civilisation’s future. And with every discovery of non-intelligent life on other planets, it becomes increasingly likely that we’re on the wrong side of that filter.
Enter, the recent discovery of life on Venus. It means that we’re much more likely to be on the wrong side.
But, watching that debate tonight, I began to feel a sense of relief. At least if we’re on the wrong side of the filter, it’s not as though we’re wasting a once-in-a-galaxy chance. We’re just yet another civilisation that failed to get past that filter. I can live with being unexceptionally mediocre.
Eh. Assuming that life on Venus is confirmed (last I heard it was promising but still speculative),I think there's a good chance that it developed from the same source as life on Earth. I tend to think that the conditions for life developing from non-life are incredibly rare, which is why we can't recreate it and have no real idea of how it happens.
Probability gets weird when it comes to existence and consciousness. A lot of pretty incredible things had to happen for human life to develop, if things didn't line up exactly right, we could easily have just not had air. But the thing is if they hadn't happened that way then we wouldn't be there to observe it not happening. It's survivorship bias. If you have to flip tails 20 times in a row in order to exist, then everyone who exists will have done it. This is known as the anthropic principle, from Wikipedia:
I think the anthropic principle explains how life can exist yet be so rare, without the need to assume that every possible species would be as fucked up as we are and nuke each other or let their own planet burn. Otoh, that's just my opinion because there's not really a scientific consensus on the matter, and the idea that life does develop often but burns out after civilization develops is certainly a valid possibility.
Some dialectics of nature are actually very likely because common elements like oxygen work consistently