humans have sent many probes towards Mars, some succeeding, some not. the main reason for most of these missions, at least of late, is to find life on Mars, or the evidence that life once existed there. other reasons include looking for water, in the form of ice, and to see if it really is feasible for humans to one day inhabit it.
though the discovery of life on Mars, or the evidence that life once existed on Mars, would be heralded in the newspapers and by most scientists, it could very well be a death knell for humankind (and is certainly something i hope never happens). why?
the Great Filter is why.
10 years ago, Robin Hanson wrote a very compelling article titled, The Great Filter -- Are We Almost Past It?, we he theorizes that life continues, evolutionarily, to fill each ecological niche, and with consciousness and technological advances, humans have done the same. the ultimate end being extra-terrestrial colonization. however, if this colonization is the result of life, and life is so abundant in our universe (as it is typically hypothesized to be), then where are they?
this Great Silence must be explained. one explanation is something called the Great Filter: either one or many very improbable steps that the evolutionary path must take to go from the building blocks of life to colonization.
the crux of the issue is this: if we find NO life anywhere else, it's likely that we've already made it through the Great Filter, having been VERY lucky and fortunate to have done so (obviously). but, BUT, if we do find life elsewhere, no matter how simple, and if we don't encounter any other sentient beings who've colonized other planets, then it's likely we've yet to reach the Great Filter.
it's a very sobering read.
two other articles about the same thing are here and here. (NOTE: the last one is a pdf of Nick Bostrom's great article that appeared in the MIT Technology Review.)
so, here's to hoping Spirit, Opportunity and Phoenix find nothing more than ice, iron oxide dust and basaltic rock.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
This is a bunch of liberal hooey, invented to get treehuggers all worked up about drilling for oil on Mars. I mean, what do they want:
to reduce our dependence on foreign oil?--fine, let us drill Mars for extra terrestrial oil.
Oh, boo hoo, don't drill Mars? Fine $10/gallon.
Pick your poison...
wait, there's oil on Mars?
that changes everything. just one more reason why i hope they don't find life on Mars, nothing to stop us from raping the red planet for more crude.
but...but, if there's no life on Mars, how'd the oil get there?
"It was put there to test your faith."--Duh.
You're just pissed because life on Mars would prove that L. Ron Hubbard was RIGHT!
and man, ain't he in the job of testing faith. seems all he ever does...ha!
yeah, you know what mjp, that's really as good (or better) a reason as any for hoping there's no life on Mars.
it seems "obvious" that life on Mars exists. it seems weird that think about life NOT having existed there. but, for all we know that "jump" from building block proteins to actual replicating life is so monumentally difficult and unlikely that it's only happened a small number of times in the entire universe. that could be one large part of the Great Filter. we've obviously gotten through that part (we had to have or we couldn't have gotten to this point, the anthropic principle plays a key role in all these "musings"), but another part could be waiting out in our futures somewhere.
just think about how unlikely some of these things are: moving from single celled to multiple celled organisms, the advent of sexual reproduction, the development of consciousness, not blowing ourselves up when nuclear power is harnessed (we barely dodged that one so far, and still might not make it through). add all those unlikelinesses up and you've got yourself one gigantic probability against us.
Post a Comment