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."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:40PM (6 children)
What are the odds of intelligent life emerging on our planet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @03:40PM (1 child)
What is missing from TFS is a suitably rigorous definition of "life" and "intelligence", without which any analytic conclusions are rendered moot.
Worse is the tacit assumption that "life" and "intelligence" are somehow valuable and hence interesting within the framework of existence - a question that can only be begged while one lacks a universally acceptable metric for "goodness".
There is no evidence that the history and outcome of intelligent life is any less deterministic and inevitable than the flow of magma from a volcano.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 21 2020, @07:34PM
“Interesting” and “valuable” are not absolute quantities, they only are defined relative to some entity. What is interesting to you may not be interesting to me, and vice versa.
Anyway, studying how likely certain things or properties emerge doesn't really say something about how valuable or interesting those are (other than that they are interesting enough to the researchers for them to decide to research it).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday May 21 2020, @05:00PM (2 children)
That's gonna be a hard integer zero, my friend.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday May 21 2020, @07:48PM (1 child)
An integer zero? I'd think a real zero to be more appropriate. Or even a rational zero.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday May 22 2020, @05:42AM
Maybe the OP is both a frequentist and a believer in determinism. That is, all probabilities of specific events are always either 0 (the event cannot occur) or 1 (the even must occur).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @06:57PM
Could be 50m to 100m years with 4b years remaining until time is up for Sol III. Life still has a decent amount of time to figure it out.
When technological capability does evolve again, the paleontologists and archaeologists will find evidence of the Anthropocene in the geological record, including a layer of caesium-137 that was deposited simultaneously across the globe. They will find evidence of a prior technological civilization. The pieces will be put together.
It will give them much to think about.
Lately I wonder if the only worthwhile thing is finding a way to leave a message for them. A Rosetta stone containing the languages in use across the globe at the time the Cs-137 layer was deposited, perhaps a copy of the Voyager golden record, things along those lines.
Can we help them to understand and avoid the mistakes the humans made?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:41PM (4 children)
So you guess, then you reinforce your guesses, and this produces a statistical model where your initial guesses are the most probable. Right?
(Score: 5, Touché) by takyon on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:44PM
I guess so.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by theluggage on Thursday May 21 2020, @05:47PM (2 children)
It's more like this...
You have a bag containing a mixture of green and blue balls. You don't know if it contains
(a) 10 green balls and 9990 blue balls
(b) 5000 green balls and 5000 blue balls
(c) 9990 green balls and 10 blue balls.
...And because this is math, sensible actions like opening the bag ad counting aren't an option. Bloody math.
Regular probability tells you that the chances of blindly pulling out a green ball are, respectively, either (a) 1/1000, (b) 1/2 or (c) 999/1000 and - assuming you replace the balls - that probability will remain constant however many balls you pull, because each selection is an independent event.
...which is, of course, pedantically correct, but realistically nonsense because each ball that you pull gives you a clue as to the distribution.
if the first ball you pull out is green then - although it doesn't prove anything - hypothesis (a) just lost a lot of plausibility. You'll still need a lot of draws to work out a reliable estimate for the proportion of green and blue balls in the bag (which is what the mathematically correct but stupid high school probability problem would be) but even one or two draws would make scenarios like (a) and (b) very unlikely.
(Complete the subject to make a well-know phrase or saying...)
As for extraterrestrial life, we've only pulled one ball so far and it's green (well, actually a rather nice blue, white and what tends to look like brown marble pattern but it's metaphorically green) but, honestly, that is enough to put the burden of proof (that we're on the outer rim of some cosmic bell curve) on those who deny the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
The point of the Drake equation is that it puts long odds on each step or a a chain of requirement for planets with intelligent life, and demonstrates that - when multiplied by the rather impressive number of stars in the galaxy - you still get a significant number. It's only an (astronomically large) ball-park.
It's also worth remembering that, back when the Drake equation was formulated, all we knew was that a was couple of stars might have been wobbling because they had planets - now there is a huge catalogue of exoplanets, and not just ones that were only detected because they were three times the size of Jupiter. So some of the wild guesses in Drake can already be refined.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Thursday May 21 2020, @07:52PM (1 child)
What we have to deal with is the conditional probability *given* that the first ball was green, because if it hadn't been green we wouldn't be around to ask the question.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday May 22 2020, @01:39PM
OK, I shouldn't have said "we've drawn a green ball" - because, as you say, anybody capable of asking the question must - by definition - be on a green ball so it's not really the same as happening to draw a green ball from the bag.
The real point is that - until we have a few more data-points we're in the educated guess business - it's to soon to even go Bayesian on it and expect any real results. All probability is good for here is "thought experiments" that help decide which is the best "null" hypothesis. The possibility that we're the only "intelligent" life in the universe can only be disproven if ET says "hello" - the best we have is plausibility arguments as to why it is not the best hypothesis.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 21 2020, @02:03PM (21 children)
Is early/simple life really distinguishable from fire? Conversely: prove that fire isn't alive.
If we end up nuking all our land masses to glass, was the whole of life on Earth any different from fire in the long view?
The thing about statistical models of the emergence of "complex" life is that the significant unknowns are impossible to pin down even within high multiple orders of magnitude. Ooze in a pond developed cell walls and complexity emerged from there. Fine, how many times did that happen and the ooze making the cell walls failed to find competitive advantage against the non-cell-walled ooze? (R 1.0). How many ponds were there? How many ponds with the right set of ingredients to enable cell walls? etc.
We don't even know if the transition to complexity happened in a surface pond, in the light, in the dark, in the deep ocean, what chemical cycle was used to fuel the original transition, etc.
Bayesian inference is a great tool, and it can help with "fuzzy" input variables, but when that fuzz is approaching zero real information content, all your tool has done is help you to express 99.44% pure speculation, mathematically with lots of flowcharts and distribution graphs all based on more nearly pure speculation. I guess it gets people published and there's monetary reward for that, in certain circles, but is there any correlation to value for anyone other than the authors?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday May 21 2020, @02:21PM
The nuclear glass [wikipedia.org] is prettier.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/03/02/1658200 [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @02:43PM
I agree completely.
Maybe this guy saw the fame that came to the creator of the Drake Equation and wanted to make his own more complicated analog.
Both are a classic case of GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out, with complete mathematical precision.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 21 2020, @03:00PM (4 children)
I'm just asking myself, "How do you do statistical analysis on an example of one?" So, yeah, what you said too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @03:14PM (3 children)
First you assume a distribution.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 21 2020, @05:29PM (2 children)
What does Coach Butterworth say happens when you Ass/u/me?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @08:35PM
I'd ask him, but he's busy fucking Mrs. Butterworth [scene7.com]. That horny little bitch is so sweet!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @10:05PM
I think he says "dis/tri/buti/on"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 21 2020, @03:24PM (7 children)
Fire doesn't have the ability to ask dumb questions. As to the second question, did the past happen, if it's not the past any more? Some of the most reprehensible and destructive human ideologies heavily used the idea that the past can be destroyed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @03:32PM (2 children)
I don't believe you, and am therefore issuing a damnatio memoriae upon you and this notion that one can eliminate the past shall fade away.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 21 2020, @05:45PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @10:10PM
The man without a grandiose sense of self-importance, is... is... like if a man is good [youtu.be].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 21 2020, @04:45PM (3 children)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @08:12PM (2 children)
No, no it did not. :,-(
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 21 2020, @08:38PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @05:33AM
You're not here for the hunting are you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @06:18PM (1 child)
The paper is open access [pnas.org], in case you want to view it.
By the way, you are criticising the Bayesian approach with frequentist arguments. I would have thought that we'd be beyond that after more than 100 years, but that frequentist mindset will not be shaken off easily!
Abstract:
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 22 2020, @12:27AM
After a statement like that, I'm not reading any farther - sure, technology didn't bloom until the last 900 million years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 21 2020, @07:40PM (3 children)
In the long run, life will end. The second law of thermodynamics is merciless.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 21 2020, @08:44PM (1 child)
Spoken like a philosophical absolutist.
But, why does the universe exist, and with energy flows that can power useful work? If it began once, why couldn't another beginning happen? If it's eternal, why has it not reached a "heat death" state yet?
Maybe we're the children of a Type V civilization that while unable to escape the heat death of their own multiverse, was able to spawn a new universe and seed it in a way that would cause new life to evolve. Maybe they couldn't perpetuate themselves, but they could perpetuate life. And maybe, in some unimaginably distant future, our descendants will achieve Type V, and use all that power to do it all over again, give birth to a new universe.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 22 2020, @11:40PM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 22 2020, @12:31AM
That's the interesting thing about life, it there's a loophole in the 2nd law, life is going to be what finds it. We've only been aware of the 2nd law of thermodynamics for the last 0.0000000001% (approx) of the life of the universe - I find it entirely probable that there's aspects of it, applicable in parts of the universe we haven't even observed yet but our progeny may one day visit (or not...) that we don't know about that just might constitute a loophole in this simple law that has passed all of our tests so far.
It wasn't so long ago that "what goes up must come down" was similarly inviolable.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @07:30PM
How does panspermia factor into this?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @09:23PM (1 child)
Some animal species like elephants, cetaceans such as dolphins, some birds such as corvids and parrots, display obvious signs of intelligence to an impartial observer; complex learned behaviors and social interaction, logic, tool construction and use, complex language. What they do not have, is sufficient manipulative capabilities and/or incentive to build ever more complex tools and ultimately end up with a machine civilization able to imprint itself on the face of Earth.
Who could know how many such species came and went, in the millions and millions of years, prior to the one that started digging up the planet - with the now probable-looking result of extincting themselves and all/most of the others a few paltry millenia after?
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday May 22 2020, @05:47AM
This is why I like the term technological life to describe us rather then intelligent life. Besides intelligence, for technicality life you need a few things, ability to manipulate stuff for obvious reasons, language and a love of telling stories for a culture to develop and grow as well as to stand on the shoulders of those who came before. There's likely other criteria too.
Intelligence, to one degree or another actually seems fairly common, even some insects can show it.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday May 21 2020, @09:59PM
Kipping's video [youtube.com] about the subject.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 22 2020, @03:22AM (1 child)
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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday May 22 2020, @05:53AM
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.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday May 22 2020, @03:26PM
A+B/N=? is meaningless when you only know two of the variables. Knowing this, asking for the answer is stupid. We have no way whatsoever of enumerating how many planets have life, because we only have the tiniest of clues as to how life got started here. When you know how it started here, then you just MIGHT be able to come to a close guess. Right now we only know of one planet with life, and we don't know how it started. For all we know (I think it's doubtful) this is the birthplace of life in the galaxy, and maybe the universe.
Refusing to admit to your own ignorance is stupid.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org