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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-just-don't-have-anything-interesting-to-say dept.

New study estimates the odds of life and intelligence emerging beyond our planet:

We know from the geological record that life started relatively quickly, as soon our planet's environment was stable enough to support it. We also know that the first multicellular organism, which eventually produced today's technological civilization, took far longer to evolve, approximately 4 billion years.

But despite knowing when life first appeared on Earth, scientists still do not understand how life occurred, which has important implications for the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe.

In a new paper published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences today, David Kipping, an assistant professor in Columbia's Department of Astronomy, shows how an analysis using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference could shed light on how complex extraterrestrial life might evolve in alien worlds.

"The rapid emergence of life and the late evolution of humanity, in the context of the timeline of evolution, are certainly suggestive," Kipping said. "But in this study it's possible to actually quantify what the facts tell us."

To conduct his analysis, Kipping used the chronology of the earliest evidence for life and the evolution of humanity. He asked how often we would expect life and intelligence to re-emerge if Earth's history were to repeat, re-running the clock over and over again.

He framed the problem in terms of four possible answers: Life is common and often develops intelligence, life is rare but often develops intelligence, life is common and rarely develops intelligence and, finally, life is rare and rarely develops intelligence.

This method of Bayesian statistical inference—used to update the probability for a hypothesis as evidence or information becomes available—states prior beliefs about the system being modeled, which are then combined with data to cast probabilities of outcomes.

"The technique is akin to betting odds," Kipping said. "It encourages the repeated testing of new evidence against your position, in essence a positive feedback loop of refining your estimates of likelihood of an event."

From these four hypotheses, Kipping used Bayesian mathematical formulas to weigh the models against one another. "In Bayesian inference, prior probability distributions always need to be selected," Kipping said. "But a key result here is that when one compares the rare-life versus common-life scenarios, the common-life scenario is always at least nine times more likely than the rare one."


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 22 2020, @03:22AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday May 22 2020, @03:22AM (#997704) Journal

    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/01/earth-wont-die-soon-thought [sciencemag.org]

    Somewhere between 100 million and 1.5 billion years left for life on Earth. Intelligence could have missed the cut-off easily.

    Somewhere in the universe (hundreds of billions or trillions of galaxies), an intelligent (language/tool/machine-using) species has probably emerged only to get wiped out by an asteroid or stellar activity.

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  • (Score: 2) by dry on Friday May 22 2020, @05:53AM

    by dry (223) on Friday May 22 2020, @05:53AM (#997740) Journal

    On the Earth itself, technological life may have started and got wiped out a few times over the last few 100 million years. Might of just stopped developing along the technological path too. How many groups of humans have stopped developing beyond the hunter gather stone age tools stage. Any tool users who were in a limited geographical area likely wouldn't leave easily found traces.