this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
157 points (99.4% liked)
chapotraphouse
13814 readers
728 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes but it's actually the opposite of what to look for, understanding evolution. Evolution is historically contingent - it only builds on what it already has. Life on earth has billions of years of a semi-random walk on which life was built. If you replayed it under slightly different conditions you would expect to see something quite different.
For example, we depict aliens as humanoid in fiction, mostly so we can tell storoes. The more imaginative writers might make them look reptilian or something. But there's no reason to think they would even have bilateral symmetry. Or have cells. Or live on the same spatial or temporal scale. The same applies to biochemistry.
It's understandable that people would want to look for the familiar to look for life, but our own knowledge of how life on earth operates tells us that we need to look for something fairly unfamiliar.
even so, we can't really look for what we don't know to look for. if we take spectra from a billion exoplanets we'd definitely recognize something very similar to ours if that happened to exist in the set.
you drop your phone at night and look for it where the streetlight illuminates because you can't see in the dark
The problem here is that we don't know you dropped your phone. Instead of a phone it might be a pool of jelly or an entire asteroid or a lichen thing that eats methane and only lives on the absolute best, truly primo rocks. So when you illuminate it you go, "aww man it's just a rock!" and move on. And you already know other life isn't going to be a phone, that's something for humans in particular. You need to look for the rock dwellers, they are more likely than the phone-havers.
One also has to make peace with the fact that we may not know if there is life in other solar systems for a very, very long time. It probably requires making an actual visit and sending back results. And that would likely take hundreds of thousands of years in our small neighborhood of systems. We can imagine getting really good telescopes before that, I suppose, but they would probably have limits. As in, with what resolution could we make observations via a constellation of telescopes distributed around the solar system? So we can get much better spatial resolution to ask the most important question: is there metabolism?
sure maybe it's in your pocket. the point of the analogy is that you look where you can see, i.e. with bias, not that we're looking for evidence of silicon fabrication.
The bias is incorrect, though
i'm not sure what you mean, biases aren't true or false they're a thumb on the scale. we know what we look like, we would instantly recognize something that looks like we do but that's separate from how likely it is for something else to look like earth life or whether there's anything to find at all.
As I explained, the more likely thing to look for is certain kinds of dissimilarity. Not a phone, but something living off rocks. The bias is reversed from what is probable.