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.
There are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the universe. Ignoring the stats on which planets in which areas of the universe are more likely to host life, you're more likely to win the lottery thousands of times in your own lifetime than Earth is to be the host of the first life in the universe.
And that's only planets around stars, and only in the observable universe.
Yeah, that's why it would be fucking cool.
It’s possible. Having a surface with both water and land is exceptionally rare and gives us a huge head start, as water is a better environment for the early stages of evolution while land is a better environment for intelligent life to arise. Also, coasts are an amazing environment for life to begin.
And having tides makes our coasts even more volatile for combinations of amino acids. Not to mention Earth’s resource and biome diversity, which also encourages the development of intelligent life.
There’s also all the other prerequisites for life to exist in the first place, which seem to be extraordinarily rare.
I think it's hard to make this conclusion. We know very little about planets outside our solar system. We can make guesses and some small measurements about their general composition but that's about it. We can't really tell if there's water or beaches or tides or anything else. We can only make guesses.