The Drake equation and the Fermi paradox are perfect examples of how math can be used to model anything but how that model may not necessarily have any basis in reality.
The fermi parable suggests out of the billons of stars we see in the galaxy that have planets, we should at least see another intelligent civilization out there and yet we see nothing. Leave the math out of it because it's true, we should at least see 1 other civilization spinning around its parent star. So far they haven't even found unintelligent life.
@@derringera I disagree. The Drake Equation is just fine... With a few additions. These equations have a Very real basis. Everyone thinks they're super Smart, but it's hard to out do These men..
I read about tectonic plates being essential for advanced life on earth in the book Improbable Planet by Hugh Ross (highly recommended). In addition to tectonic plates, there are actually a ton of other attributes that make earth exceedingly unique and suitable for advanced life (i.e. more than just Goldilocks zone, magnetic field, and water), including the type of galaxy we're in, our location within the galaxy, the type of star we orbit, the size and position of the other planets in the solar system, the elemental composition of earth, the size of the moon, the earth's tilt.. the list goes on - it's mind blowing that more people aren't talking about all of these factors together..
Absolutely. Such factors hugely affect the probability of life, as we know it, existing elsewhere. However, the observable universe is said to contain 2 trillion galaxies totalling some 10,000 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Some of these stars have surely hosted a super rare planet with Earth-like condition in the past, or may do so in the future. If any other such super rare planets do exist today then the chances of them being within speed of light communication distances of Earth on human timeframes, is equally remote. Plus the Universe is a dangerous place with gamma ray bursts, supernovae, black holes, & god knows what else that can or has swallowed or destroyed other living planets. Yet the scum who often rise to the top leadership of our civilizations, act in ways which are trashing life on our beautiful jewel in the Universe.
@@mikeharrington5593 The problem is two hundred trillion times nothing (or next to nothing) is still nothing or next to nothing. And that's the way the Drake equation works, it only takes one of the factors to be a bottleneck and you get a nearly "empty" universe.
@@mikeharrington5593 Just one of those conditions (the type of star we orbit) rules out at least 90% of all stars. As Phillip said, you can have heaps of stars but if the probability of all the conditions needed are low enough, that in the end might not matter.
I was going to say Hugh Ross but you beat me to it. He also proposed that there are different aspects of habitable zone for an Earth like planet in order for life to exist- Plate Tectonics, a big enough moon, a medium sized star with just the right levels of radiation, etc. This is the Rare Earth hypothesis.
Another part of the problem is that we don't know how life first arose on Earth, or how likely that was - it might not matter the Earth is super rare if life will just spawn anywhere and cope with the local conditions.
4:22 - "Something makes Earth special". My money is on the moon... Impact forces from its creation event to get plate tectonics going, and tidal forces after to sustain it.
The amount of things that came together to allow humans to be where they are is enormous. From the planet's location in the system, to the abundance of water, evolution of mammals, the dinosaur extinction (and probably other extinction events), the axis of the planet, the moon/tides, the magnetic field, and probably a whole lot more I am forgetting. Edit: including tectonic plates.
Jupiter also acts as a space vacuum or our planet will be bombarded with asteroids. Our solar system is also located where supernovas are hard to reach. Read "Rare Earth." It changed my mind that we are probably alone in the universe.
Isaac Asimov looked at this question in detail (including everything mentioned here) and came up with a figure of about 500,000 in our galaxy alone. But that means planets are on average 600 light years apart, an enormous distance. Since there is no known way of overcoming the light speed barrier, it would be more surprising if we had seen another civilization than if we had not.
The Earth is either a dyson sphere (created by a higher dimensional existence a.k.a God) which is exactly the story the Bible tells us, Or we are truly living in a simulated universe. Too many "coincidences" to be naturally occurring. Both theories will also suggest we are truly alone in our dimension.😢
We have only been in a position to effectively receive signals from space during my lifetime. Compare that with the time it takes for planets to form and life to evolve to our level. It is very unlikely that two advanced civilisations on separate planets would ever coincide in real time. It would be similar to two people roaming an empty area the size of the Sahara Desert, meeting by chance, in the first week.
I believe there could be life out there at or above our tech level, but the odds of us being close are fairly remote. And if an advanced civilization was looking for other life, it’d take them eons just to check their own local area. It’s sad. The sheer size of the universe is what’s holding any life back from being able to find each other.
it doesn't matter our life time. Think about this, at current rhythm, if you give us 10k years, 100k, 1M (nothing...) we would leave tech signs all over the Galaxy. Even after we are gone those would be still visible (e.g. in excess of infrared emitted by mega structures around, spaces proves - likely with AI - would have likely cross the milky way from side to side etc) But there is nothing... there was no one before... sad, wierd , maybe this is really a simulation? it's on of the most likely Fermi parados solution for me.
"All life comes from a single moment of creation. Some 3.8 billion years ago in some bubbling mud pot or deep ocean thermal vent. Some little bag of chemicals twitched and became animate and than miraculously reproduced itself. Everything that lives now on earth, or ever has lived, descends from that moment. We are all built from a single original blueprint. I don't believe there is a more important or remarkable fact in the natural world, indeed in any world, then that one." ~Bill Bryson
This would actually make a lot of sense and I have thought about this idea before. I have read about how the Theia impact which created the moon was something that helped to give the earth its magnetic field, and also played a role in giving the earth plate tectonics, both of which are crucial for life on earth (plate tectonics creates hydrothermal vents and is the reason that life was able to leave the ocean). These are very specific events that would drastically reduce the amount of planets that can support life.
Starship Troopers "it's AFRAID" meme, with "Fermi Paradox" written on the brain bug. We aren't "solving" it. We're just looking at it with an increasing academic desperation. We probably have at least one bad assumption.
My thoughts with Dark Energy, as well. Fudge factors and predictions which clearly don't match up with reality are classic signs of an upcoming paradigm shift.
The Fermi paradox was originally meant to prove intelligent life _wasn't_ common. That we call answers that avoid the paradox entirely by proposing it's rare enough we reasonably wouldn't have noticed "solutions" to it is one of the more bizarre quirks of academic language - like it's forever stuck in the bargaining phase instead of coming to grips with us being alone in the universe.
We are actually talking about adjustments to the n variable ie How many planets suitable for life ? obvious requirements are the goldilocks zone but iv always said 2 requirements absolutely necessary 1: a moon to drive the weather and 2 : a big Jupiter like outer planet that plays defence to earths quarterback. I use this analogy because the early formation of a solar system is messy and Jupiter swallowed a lot of planet killer comets and its orbit still cleans a path around us that is almost meteor free. the result millions of years of mostly stability. 3 : a molten core with a magnetic dipole or we would die of a solar radiation.
I would add that: advanced civilization would need a partially oxidizing atmosphere, not too wet as well. We would be nowhere without the ability to control fire.
@@blacksmith67it would be interesting to see how advanced a civilization could get if they never discovered fire. Could a different path through technology lead to some pretty neat inventions
Recent models call into question that whole Jupiter blocking asteroids thing. Don't remember the details but there was a video on antons channel a while back
Actually this affects complex life variable, not planet suitable for life. Without plate tectonics the planet is still suitable for life but not complex life and there is a higher risk of it becoming unsuitable for life.
The human race as a species is biologically made to live on the earth. In any event it’s the only planet in the universe where you can find dogs, so it’s the only place for me.
Plate tectonics is very useful for building a technological civilization. First of all, it brings the metals to the surface. But still, volcanism similar to the one on Venus would do this anyway. Maybe not as effectively but that would be still something.
Yeah there's a lot that could bring metals to the surface. I'd argue that tectonics though , because they take CAN so long to reach the surface , can also hamper technological development.
Plate tectonics is also necessary for creating fossil fuels that are needed to fully take advantage of those metals. There would also need to be a carboniferous-like period to produce all the plant life that is the basis for fossil fuels. A planet can have a lot of iron on it's surface but without coal it can't be turned into steel.
@@robo5013 There's such an idea as what if there was no oil? I think it's called a Steampunk world. But it's possible we could have been in a world with no coal either. In which case wood would be turned into charcoal then used to fire the furnace or smelter. But would it be a bad thing if the Industrial Revolution had occurred slowly over hundreds of years?
@@sandal_thong8631also people have seemed to survive a good long bit without oil, so no reason to postulate it needs to be there for civilization to occur
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you. As an old geographer, I have been thinking along these lines a long time, and I am overjoyed to see it hitting the mainstream.
I've been thinking about trees in relation to the Fermi paradox. I think if trees never evolved, it would have been very hard for technological civilization to arise. We evolved hands in order to grab onto tree branches. Some of our oldest weapons and tools were made of wood. Wood has been used as a building material since always. The first forests on Earth fossilized and became coal, which we used to kickstart the industrial revolution. And there are probably many other reasons why trees have been enormously important for our evolution. Maybe there are tons of planets out there with life on them, but none of them just happened to evolve anything similar to trees.
Earth had bigger mammals (with bigger brains) before trees existed. It's more about diverse complexity that functions as a catalyst for intelligent and eventually technologically advanced life.
@@falseprophet1024 Possibly, but not necessarily. It took life on Earth a long time to evolve a fungal organism that could break down lignin so we had about 50M years during which trees would fall and simply lay around meaning that the wood could be subsequently buried and compressed into various types of coal. After that time, coal would only form when the tree fell into anaerobic conditions and doesn't have the same calorific content as the best anthracite. Even now, we have seen microorganisms that can break down crude oil into carbon-dioxide and water (even if incompletely), so a planet might get unlucky and get their reserves destroyed or depleted in some way.
@@davidbrisbane7206Its not rarer, Any Intelligent species can also exist in different environment different than earth With a suitable atmosphere, Active plate tectonics, and Warm temperature, it doesnt need to have the same environment like earth, carbon based life is common Around Terrestrial planets, while ammonia and silicon based life form is much rarer, so warm temperature Is The most Likely candidate for Alien life forms to exist, While Intelligent life require A much complex factors to exist In such Environment.
Earth is the jewel that hangs on the cheek of Night. Rare and precious and beautiful beyond compare. And we pollute it like there's no tomorrow. And we take people and animals for granted instead of the wonderful rare beings that they truly are.
@@davidbrisbane7206 I figure each spiral galaxy produces 20 to 30 intelligent species throughout its life cycle, and we are probably #10 or #11 for the Milky Way. The next species will develop in about a billion years, long after we are gone.
@@cillyhoney1892Correct. Global priority is to stop using fossil fuels. How to get China and India to stop burning coal to generate energy? Maybe when the coal runs out?
i felt sad yesterday when i detected the slightest hint of you getting sick, and now this one today. just know this chica here in austin sends blessings for a speedy recovery & thanks for all i've learned through your channel-my fave! PS these researchers should define what they mean by "complex life," because when i look at the octopus, i'd take exception to the notion that complex life, perforce, requires land.
1st. usually complex life usually refers to multicelular life .i.e. progressing past single celled organisms. The video somewhat explains why the researchers believe that complex life requires continental land, as well as large oceans. I'd encourage you to read the paper for a better explanation. 2nd. What a loser lol "i felt sad yesterday when i detected the slightest hint of you getting sick" Who tf says shit like this.
Octopi are indeed impressive. I think they are smarter than we know. Have you seen the work people are doing with training their cats to use word buttons to "speak". I wonder if someone could do this for an octopus -- no telling what they'd have to say.
@@bradarmstrong3952i'm aware of that with cats but haven't seen it yet… and as for octopi, i know there are several folks who are actively researching their intelligence with puzzles, etc., and (at least inho) it's 100% alien life right here among us! sometimes i really do wonder if humans really *are* adapted at all (especially when the internet went down yesterday, and folks couldn't buy gas or food or make calls and just starred off absently into the blurry distance).
This is also link to the phosphorus rare earth solution, since phosphorus is critical to anything with a skeleton, and phosphorus comes from the weathering of continental crust. Weathering, of course, speeds up with erosion, and erosion speeds up with elevation. So mountain chains directly lead to skeletons
Why does life need to evolve the way it did on earth? Just because we have never encountered other types of life, doesn't mean they do not exist. If humans only look for life that is similar to ours, that is all we will find. Keeping open minds is in our own interests. If the universe is truly stranger than we can imagine... Thank you, Anton!
Hard to look for something if we have no idea how to tune our equipment to find it because we have no idea what it is ;) I think there is quite good understanding of chemistry of all the elements in periodic table. Turns out there is no life on Earth without carbon and everything is based on some form of DNA(RNA). If there was life that is constructed somewhat different wouldn't we have any example of those here on our planet?
A bit like asking why we look for stars that are made of hydrogen just because our sun is like that. Because that's just how stars are. Life is likely fairly similar or at least follows the same processes.
Billions of galaxies and some say there is nobody out there just us lmfao The Universe is so huge and hard to grasp that we struggle to even write fiction around our current understanding of it.
@@dingickso4098 Is it easy to grasp the amount of very specific and "lucky" conditions that had to happen in certain order for us to be here, and things that had to NOT happen in the process for us to STILL be here? I think that's the biggest problem. People have it pretty easy to understand how ridiculously huge the cosmos is. Way easier than understanding how fkin far we are from single cellular organisms and from conditions for those to emerge from dead matter.
We are pretty sure that live can only develop at a border between liquid and solid. Liquids and gases can not hold structures, while solids can not change. There are some changes inside solids, but they are so slow that we would not recognise them as changes. This limits live to planets where there is a liquid at the surface, which limits the possible distance to the star.
Plate tectonics is mainly due to the collision with Thea and the resulting Moon. The Earth and Moon is basically a binary planet. Astronomers should thus look for binary planets in the habitable zone.
The universe is full of life and it is all around us. We however are very primitive and are by their law being treated like The Andaman Island, where they're not allowed to mess with us because we're supposed to develop on our own. But religion explains well how to speak to them. All the religious beings are ET. The human body houses a portion of the soul as part of its development. The universe is truly magical.
The moon rings like a bell🤔 The depth of bigger craters are all about the same depth 🤔🤔 One half's denseness is different than the other .it just "happens" to be almost a perfect half looking away from us with that different density 🤔🤔 The rock on the top are older than the rocks excavated from a deeper depth 🤔🤔🤔 the moon is a strange place for sure ...
Theia's liquid core sunk into Earth's core, increasing its diameter . Also some parts of Theia 's mantle got trapped in Earth's. So Earth diameter increased, which cracked the solid crust, which was then now strained and out of static balance (since diameter changed, the solid crust over it was now "bumpy" and will exert lateral forces to expand. You just kickstarted the thermal engine of plate tectonics. Juste an hypothesis.
Maybe the less dense rocks were blown to the side of the Earth opposite the impact, creating the continental masses, whilst excavating a dip in the denser rock on the side of the impact. The whole crust likely became molten for a while but perhaps the differences lasted just long enough to "stick". The new Luna formed from the impact debris in close orbit and then global tidal forces, the 1cm/s^2 acceleration might not seem much but it's 300x more than today, wreaked havoc on the cooling Earth pulling and pushing on the newly formed crust causing it to crack and fragment. Well, perhaps.
Yes I think Theia's energy is what makes the core molten enough for plate tectonics to occur. Adding Theia's core to earths also is a big factor in our magnetic field.
The Luna-forming collision between Earth and Theia blasted some of Earth's crust into orbit. One of the later Apollo missions (the only one with a Geologist) found earth crustal material on the Moon.
The take away seems to be: you need complex environments, to support complex life, in order that it can survive complex environmental conditions, so that they can become complex. Sure adds a layer of complexity.
I love your videos and enjoy your voice, but everytime I think I'm more confused than before watching, and not cuz if any bad complaints, but cuz what you talk about and explain, blows my febbel lil mind!!!
He's the least full of bs for absolute certainty. Just a super capable man doing his best which = positive results No agendas, no ulterior motives, just education, debate and informed discussions.
@@M167A1More than just a rare earth. Rare would imply it still happens somewhere else. One string of rare events after another happened over and over and if a single one didnt happen we probably wouldnt be here. But yet when we look outward we see none of the rare events happening. No exoplanet with seasons, etc… its not just a rare earth, it’s borderline impossible.
A large moon that stabilizes the planet's rotation is also critical. The Drake Equation fails to take into account many requirements for advanced technological life to exist. Advanced life is exceedingly RARE.
For several decades my solution to the Fermi Paradox has been that subterranean life (extremophiles) is common, but surface life is rare. Tectonics causes life to rise to the surface. Having an atmosphere and oceans all allows surface life to thrive. Finally a relatively stable surface allows the development of life onwards to complexity.
This is the first time I've come across a direct relationship to the Drake equation, but the idea that plate tectonics encouraged the evolution of greater intelligence in human ancestors, specifically in the region around Ethiopia has been around for decades.
Interesting. My laymen's theory is that because Earth is in a remote part of the galaxy, our planet is not periodically sterilized by super novi and similar phenomenon. Other planets develop life, but before it can evolve to the point it produces radio waves, etc., it is sterilized.
I agree. Microbial life is out there but that's it. Most of the stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs which tend to emit much less solar activity and their planets appear to be tidally locked where one side always faces the dwarf star, thereby leading to extreme temperatures. We are unique folks.
I think the reason Earth has plate tectonics while so many other planets don't is because we collided with a large body during a specific point in the solar systems (and our planet's) creation. If we were hit before or after this point, Thea would simply mold into earth and would only increase earths size, or would shatter earth into chunks of rock and gas made into many smaller objects, both leading to no plate tectonics. This collision happed at just the right time to perfectly stir up the surface and inner layers in a way that kept it fractured and a moon that ensured the plates remained separated and dynamic with its gravitational/rotational influence. Most other worlds have their surfaces melded together.
If this is the reason for life and that life is incredibly rare that is scary for our sake, because people are caught up in wars fighting each other when our existence is amazing. We need to preserve humanity but then again I will always stand by my theory of existence in which for matter to exist, for energy to exist, for anything to exist there must be no beginning. Therefore you can point at a linear timeline during this universe of our beginning but that is not the beginning of matter and energy. Before our universe is the unknown but without a doubt I believe existence is infinite therefore statistically there will be infinite occurrences of similarities. Something doesn't come from nothing but what if there was always the Something
The more we learn about the universe and our planet, The more the "Rare Earth theory" becomes the more logical answer to as why we still don't discover other intelligent life out there
I never really considered it, with the term "earth like planet/s" thrown around so often, but earth truly is very unique. Our planet so much more complex than its mass and it having water on its surface. An inpact with another planet sized object billions of years ago, plate tectonics, and so much more are likely reasons for life on earth and why the planet is seemingly special.
Since we just started looking a few minutes ago should we truly be surprised we haven’t found anyone yet? Not to mention that our ET sensors are puny. 🤔
A brilliant solution is to be found in a recent paper by the Italian astrophysicist Amedeo Balbi: combustion is really rare in the universe because most planets dont have enough oxygen in their atmospheres, so fire (and consequently advanced civilizations) can't be common
The moon has been receding from the Earth since its creation, which is thought to have happened ~4.5bn years ago. Therefor, it was once _much_ closer to Earth, and orbited much faster (the "month" would have been tens of hours to a few days long). Earth's day would have been as short as five hours long. The very close proximity would have raised *monstrous* tides. It seems quite likely that the stresses on the Earth's crust could have prevented it from ever solidifying into a thick, unyielding surface, pierced only by the occasional volcanic hot spot. Keeping the surface young, bringing up water from the interior, sequestering carbon, etc. Another important aspect of the presence of the moon is that it stabilizes the rotation of the Earth, keeping the axial tilt at around 23 degrees for billions of years. Thank you, moon!
Even if plate activity isn't one of the required ingredients for intelligent life, I would imagine that evolution would be very, very slow on a planet without plate activity. Evolution kinda needs changing environmental conditions, and I don't know that a single-plate world changes enough to encourage natural selection to do it's thang.
Assuming he actually have ten planets in our system, then a rough inference is that 10% of all planets everywhere have tectonics. Not a small number. Proposing 'rarity of tectonics' as a Fermi solution is like 30 years ago saying that we didn't 'see' that many planets out there.
I'm like 100% sure that the Theia impact event is the solution to the Fermi Paradox. The ramifications of that event, including the tides, plate tectonics, addition of important minerals, a shield from later impactors, changes to our spin - and the list goes on - I think may have been essential to the formation of complex life. The prevalence of life in the universe is based on how special that type of event really is. Because it might not just be that a collision needs to occur between two bodies similar to Theia and proto-Earth, it might also require a specific window of impact speeds and angles. ..... We could be exceptionally rare..... or we could be only fairly rare.
It's not just plate tectonics that life needs. It also needs a moon in the exact right place to create tidal function of the right levels that allows life to get stuck in rock pools, forcing it to move on to land. Not only that, it needs regular mass extinctions in order to clear out the giant predators stage of life, clearing the way for species that might have a chance to develop civilisation. Also there needs to be a few hundred million years of development in order to create fossil fuels because even with civilisation, without fossil fuels, no species is going anywhere. The number of planets in the universe is irrelevant when the conditions for civilised life are extremely exacting.
The Drake equation is only an exercise in how to address the problem. It does not provide an answer, because more than one of its multiplicative terms are essentially unconstrained. If we ever succeed in bracketing *all* the terms with decent error bars, then we might get somewhere; until then, the Drake equation remains a target, an aspiration.
I graduated from high school shortly before plate tectonics was accepted by Geologists. I didn’t know until about 1980. Recently I started following a Pacific Northwest Geology teacher on RUclips. He is not a field geologist but he has many as guests as well as some from related fields. Among them have been those in a field using technology that seems to be able kind of look into the layers inside the planet. There seem to be some very massive lumps of stuff as well as possible bits of old plates that didn’t subduct enough to melt. They think the massive lumps might be remains of the planetoid theorized to have collided with earth and caused a large chunk to break off and become our moon. The various layers and what they do would have to be affected by those massive and uneven chunks. They, more than the impact, seem to be the main reason, to this uneducated person, for not only the multiple plates but for how they move around without a pattern. Like water flowing around moving rocks.
Anton: "Today we're are going to talk about a new fascinating theory. But first, what is 'talking' exactly? Talking is a process whereby ideas are shared through sounds made with the mouth. What is a mouth? A mouth is..."
My friend Dianna the planetary geologist told me about plate tectonics and how they are responsible for life on this planet in 1989. That's why Mars died and lost it's atmosphere and water. No plate tectonics to move the volcanoes around. So this isn't really a new idea. The paper exploring the science of it is new, but plate tectonics being responsible for life on this planet has been a well known concept for awhile now.
Damn right; in the Drake equation, Fp, the proportion of "habitable planets" is a red herring. The definition of "habitable" is waaaay too optimistic. Usually they define it as being a rocky planet with water, atmosphere and temperature that allows water to be liquid. As suggested in this video, perhaps plate techtonics are necessary for complex life. I would say that spin is also needed: A planet that is spin-locked to its star would have an extremely hot side and an extremely cold side, and could only host life along a thin boundary between the two extremes; and this boundary could move more rapidly than the speed of motion its life has managed to evolve at any given time. That, plus a big, heavy moon. So when people talk about Drake's equation predicting 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy, I think of maybe 10,000 planets having some form of life, like archea, mold and viruses. Even bacteria are probably too complex to have evolved many places. Cyanobacteria maybe ...
Earth is insanely rare. It is not hubris to realize life on Earth is so mind boggling special that we may well be the most advance civilization in the galaxy at the moment.
Key word being "at the moment." The Universe has not entered its prime time of life giving worlds yet. If we survive, there is a good chance that in the ages to come *we* will be the "ancient aliens" that visit other words
Putting the Drake Equation to rest is long overdue. At best, it was an interesting thought experiment, appropriate for the time of its proposal. In practice, it's an incomplete series of gueses multiplied by each other, based on a data set of exactly one.
I've always had a strong opinion that the popularity of high Drake Equation estimates is very similar to the draw of religion. It isn't about what we expect to see, it's about what we want to see. We even have Sagan's famous quote about wasted space if we are alone. And that's why we have had such strong certainty in the face of such large unknowns.
8:18 note that the fact that this was the only way we know it could occurr on earth does not necessarily mean its the only way it could occur anywhere else
@robo5013 having that mindset limits our search. Feel free to extrapolate but don't stipulate what's out there MUST be like here. It's like you looking around your house and conclude the whole world must be the same.
@@TheDemontr1 How can we search for something that we don't have a scientific basis for? We can only search for what we know works based on science, not what we wish could be true. I, and scientists, are using the scientific method while you are fantasizing.
@robo5013 I think you misunderstood. You absolutely have to use the scientific method but to draw the conclusion life can only be x is not a good approach. It's science fiction till it's not because by that time the facts would support it. The last thing you would want is a closed minded scientist.
I find it closed minded to think that the only path to and through life is our way. I suspect the universe is still far more clever than we give it credit for.
When I tapped this OC in, I expected to get actually quite a bit more push back, but here is my counter argument. 1. The state of 'Science' as it is currently accepted is not absolute. Indeed many of the 'facts' we understand today are not the 'facts' of yesterday. Just in my lifetime alone, dinosaurs have gone from being slow moving reptiles living only in swamps, to a world full of vibrant, top of every food chain masters of the world. Truly the 'Terrors of Terra'. Black holes went from obscure egghead math to dominating galactic evolution. Plate Tectonics and Epigenetics didn't even exist as scientific fields. Before Star Trek (scientifically speaking), there were just stars... and maybe a couple planets around a few of them. Today, the skies are filled with planets (stellar system bound and rogue). A far cry from the once commonly held belief that the universe revolved around the Earth, and that Earth was IT. Point being that what we "KNOW" today may turn out to be tomorrow's "Bwahahahahhaha". 2. Science was, is , and always shall be an offshoot of Natural Philosophy. As such it remains a system of belief as concrete as any other form of religion, but still just a system of belief. It's adherents (which I count myself amongst) often forget that it is not perfect carryall of truth, and thus requires "Belief" that the system is at least the closest to the truth of all possibilities. It doesn't necessarily follow that the Theories du Jour are in fact truth. I do appreciate your POV however. Hey, Gravity is a fact. It is truth... in as much as we can observe truth from our current perspective. The problem is that we have no means of perception beyond a limited scope of view. It could turn out that gravity is actually a small scale localized phenomenon and not really relevant to the 'big picture', or maybe it still is. Hard to tell from the inside. The fact that life DID happen here (and in such a wide variety) proves that it DOES happen.All it takes is some energy and a bit of lucky chemistry. That doesn't mean it's the only lucky chemistry there is, or that these are the only conditions under which genesis can occur. The difference between the open and closed mind is that one attempts to discover truth, while the other tries to dictate it.
@@thomasgoodwin2648 I don't know how old you are, I'm 52, but when I was a kid no one thought that dinosaurs only lived in swamps and that they were all slow moving. Ah yes, the whole we believed the Earth was the center of the Universe during the Middle Ages is proof that science is often wrong argument: that was before the creation and adoption of scientific method which puts it into the category of philosophy, or just best guesses before experimental methods were created to prove or disprove a hypothesis and not pointing to one book containing fairy tales as the ultimate source of knowledge. That is basically what Natural Philosophy was but it was replaced by scientific method, it is no longer a part of actual science. This is why you don't understand why real scientists are looking for signs of life using what we know to be true about life. That is being scientific. It does not mean that they are closed minded. In fact, if they are closed minded they wouldn't be looking at all. How would you go about looking for signs of life by looking for things that we don't know to be true? How would we know if those things we observe are indicators of life at all? We couldn't. The only way we could find out that life is different than how it works on Earth would be to directly observe it. If we want to spend our very limited resources looking for life outside of Earth then we need to look for places where we know it could be possible. Otherwise we would have to send missions to every planetary body and as you pointed out there are quite a few. The notion that there could be other methods for life to form isn't being open minded but using the ideas that were prevalent in the field of Natural Philosophy, which was just fantasizing, not using scientific method which is how we study what is true not what we wish to be true.
Advanced civilizations that can leave their planet require availability of high density energy sources. If a planet never experiences a Cambrian period, then coal may never form. Likewise, if there are not a multitude of great extinction events, oil and gas may not form. It would be very difficult to leave the planet with plant life (wood) as your sole source of energy.
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is actually quite simple - more advanced civilizations no longer utilize the technologically primitive methods of communication we use, and that's why we don't see them. We scour the skies searching for other civilizations utilizing communication methods we would use, however we may well be using (and looking for) the technological equivalent of smoke signals. I'm certainly not saying there are definitely intelligent alien civilizations all around us, but certainly they would be utilizing technologies we likely couldn't even comprehend, including for communication.
The Thea impact that formed the Moon following by plate tectonics seems like an extremely specific chain of events thus possibly solving the Fermi paradox.
I've been using the PT argument for decades. There are other important considerations: like the interaction of water at subduction zones, the effects PT has on mixing and concentration on important minerals (like metals), and the effects it has on renewing landforms (mtn building and erosion) that bring those minerals w/in reach of 'life'. The FP is kind of a joke, but it does work as a vehicle for the discussion about how intelligence can evolve into intelligent life with the capabilities necessary to communicate across interstellar space...
Plate tectonics was already part of my rare Earth equation. I also hypothesized that our huge moon is responsible for plate tectonics. Also that a possible way to calculate its effect on plate tectonics would be to see if it drifting further away had an effect on it. This could be what is helping to keep our core moulton which is responsible for our magnetic field. This would make having a large moon nearly essential to cimplex life.
Basically another addition to the rare earth hypothesis. This time with some additional link to why it's important for [complex] life formation. Other include low sun activity (not a typical g star), order of big/small palanet in the solar system (small near the sun and large farther away), large moon (tide), etc. but those do not have an explicit link with life formation that was proven. The new one (plate tectonics) at least has some correlation.
Okay this is actually incredible and changes a lot of things about how we understand the possibilities of other civilizations. Our geological situation is sooo unique, definitely can't be just any green planet as some people think
Thank you, Theia. Once again. I'd say definitely a strong correlation, not yet causation, but maybe a little more digging and we will find the evidence.
Interesting theoretical idea. I think complex life could do fine along multiple paths. I lean toward the "Dark Forest" hypothesis to explain the paradox.
The true definition of life is elusive and the answer...its not exactly clear why life exists anyway, this would explain why its present here, but apparently not much elsewhere...not even scrathcing the surface of intelligent life.
The Drake equation and the Fermi paradox are perfect examples of how math can be used to model anything but how that model may not necessarily have any basis in reality.
Noone Said they were themselves perfect or correct...
The fermi parable suggests out of the billons of stars we see in the galaxy that have planets, we should at least see another intelligent civilization out there and yet we see nothing. Leave the math out of it because it's true, we should at least see 1 other civilization spinning around its parent star. So far they haven't even found unintelligent life.
@@JohnDoe-qz1qlNot their authors, sure, but people take models like this at face value all the time. OP's post is a good observation. Not an insult.
Otherwise known as "mathturbation"
@@derringera I disagree. The Drake Equation is just fine... With a few additions. These equations have a Very real basis. Everyone thinks they're super Smart, but it's hard to out do These men..
I read about tectonic plates being essential for advanced life on earth in the book Improbable Planet by Hugh Ross (highly recommended). In addition to tectonic plates, there are actually a ton of other attributes that make earth exceedingly unique and suitable for advanced life (i.e. more than just Goldilocks zone, magnetic field, and water), including the type of galaxy we're in, our location within the galaxy, the type of star we orbit, the size and position of the other planets in the solar system, the elemental composition of earth, the size of the moon, the earth's tilt.. the list goes on - it's mind blowing that more people aren't talking about all of these factors together..
Absolutely. Such factors hugely affect the probability of life, as we know it, existing elsewhere. However, the observable universe is said to contain 2 trillion galaxies totalling some 10,000 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
Some of these stars have surely hosted a super rare planet with Earth-like condition in the past, or may do so in the future. If any other such super rare planets do exist today then the chances of them being within speed of light communication distances of Earth on human timeframes, is equally remote.
Plus the Universe is a dangerous place with gamma ray bursts, supernovae, black holes, & god knows what else that can or has swallowed or destroyed other living planets. Yet the scum who often rise to the top leadership of our civilizations, act in ways which are trashing life on our beautiful jewel in the Universe.
@@mikeharrington5593 The problem is two hundred trillion times nothing (or next to nothing) is still nothing or next to nothing. And that's the way the Drake equation works, it only takes one of the factors to be a bottleneck and you get a nearly "empty" universe.
@@mikeharrington5593 Just one of those conditions (the type of star we orbit) rules out at least 90% of all stars. As Phillip said, you can have heaps of stars but if the probability of all the conditions needed are low enough, that in the end might not matter.
I was going to say Hugh Ross but you beat me to it. He also proposed that there are different aspects of habitable zone for an Earth like planet in order for life to exist- Plate Tectonics, a big enough moon, a medium sized star with just the right levels of radiation, etc. This is the Rare Earth hypothesis.
Another part of the problem is that we don't know how life first arose on Earth, or how likely that was - it might not matter the Earth is super rare if life will just spawn anywhere and cope with the local conditions.
4:22 - "Something makes Earth special". My money is on the moon... Impact forces from its creation event to get plate tectonics going, and tidal forces after to sustain it.
The amount of things that came together to allow humans to be where they are is enormous. From the planet's location in the system, to the abundance of water, evolution of mammals, the dinosaur extinction (and probably other extinction events), the axis of the planet, the moon/tides, the magnetic field, and probably a whole lot more I am forgetting. Edit: including tectonic plates.
And we p*ss it all away by destroying our livable habitats.
Jupiter also acts as a space vacuum or our planet will be bombarded with asteroids. Our solar system is also located where supernovas are hard to reach. Read "Rare Earth." It changed my mind that we are probably alone in the universe.
Isaac Asimov looked at this question in detail (including everything mentioned here) and came up with a figure of about 500,000 in our galaxy alone. But that means planets are on average 600 light years apart, an enormous distance. Since there is no known way of overcoming the light speed barrier, it would be more surprising if we had seen another civilization than if we had not.
The Earth is either a dyson sphere (created by a higher dimensional existence a.k.a God) which is exactly the story the Bible tells us,
Or we are truly living in a simulated universe. Too many "coincidences" to be naturally occurring.
Both theories will also suggest we are truly alone in our dimension.😢
Anthropic principle is the only thing that makes sense.
Thank you Anton, take care of yourself.
I always enjoy Fermi Paradox videos.
Seеms that the Fermi Paradox is not paradox at all.
Signor Fermi was a good chap.
They’re useless
We have only been in a position to effectively receive signals from space during my lifetime. Compare that with the time it takes for planets to form and life to evolve to our level. It is very unlikely that two advanced civilisations on separate planets would ever coincide in real time. It would be similar to two people roaming an empty area the size of the Sahara Desert, meeting by chance, in the first week.
I believe there could be life out there at or above our tech level, but the odds of us being close are fairly remote. And if an advanced civilization was looking for other life, it’d take them eons just to check their own local area. It’s sad. The sheer size of the universe is what’s holding any life back from being able to find each other.
Actually, I read somewhere that in 1902, there were only 2 cars in the whole state of Kentucky, and they collided with each other...
@@garyjonah22 For real?! That’s crazy! LOL. Why couldn’t they avoid each other? 😂
@@blastypowpow Kentucky bourbon might have been the problem perhaps.
it doesn't matter our life time. Think about this, at current rhythm, if you give us 10k years, 100k, 1M (nothing...) we would leave tech signs all over the Galaxy. Even after we are gone those would be still visible (e.g. in excess of infrared emitted by mega structures around, spaces proves - likely with AI - would have likely cross the milky way from side to side etc) But there is nothing... there was no one before... sad, wierd , maybe this is really a simulation? it's on of the most likely Fermi parados solution for me.
"All life comes from a single moment of creation. Some 3.8 billion years ago in some bubbling mud pot or deep ocean thermal vent. Some little bag of chemicals twitched and became animate and than miraculously reproduced itself. Everything that lives now on earth, or ever has lived, descends from that moment. We are all built from a single original blueprint. I don't believe there is a more important or remarkable fact in the natural world, indeed in any world, then that one." ~Bill Bryson
This would actually make a lot of sense and I have thought about this idea before. I have read about how the Theia impact which created the moon was something that helped to give the earth its magnetic field, and also played a role in giving the earth plate tectonics, both of which are crucial for life on earth (plate tectonics creates hydrothermal vents and is the reason that life was able to leave the ocean). These are very specific events that would drastically reduce the amount of planets that can support life.
Starship Troopers "it's AFRAID" meme, with "Fermi Paradox" written on the brain bug.
We aren't "solving" it. We're just looking at it with an increasing academic desperation.
We probably have at least one bad assumption.
My thoughts with Dark Energy, as well. Fudge factors and predictions which clearly don't match up with reality are classic signs of an upcoming paradigm shift.
Yeah, like the aliens aren't already the hot super models from hell encouraging technocracy using mind controlled drones...
@@jameshinds2510dark energy has been argued against from the beginning and is only a funding opportunity
The Fermi paradox was originally meant to prove intelligent life _wasn't_ common. That we call answers that avoid the paradox entirely by proposing it's rare enough we reasonably wouldn't have noticed "solutions" to it is one of the more bizarre quirks of academic language - like it's forever stuck in the bargaining phase instead of coming to grips with us being alone in the universe.
@@angrymokyuu9475 funny how we always end up in a stupid little ant-circle like this.
Positive waves, love wins.
We are actually talking about adjustments to the n variable ie How many planets suitable for life ? obvious requirements are the goldilocks zone but iv always said 2 requirements absolutely necessary 1: a moon to drive the weather and 2 : a big Jupiter like outer planet that plays defence to earths quarterback. I use this analogy because the early formation of a solar system is messy and Jupiter swallowed a lot of planet killer comets and its orbit still cleans a path around us that is almost meteor free. the result millions of years of mostly stability. 3 : a molten core with a magnetic dipole or we would die of a solar radiation.
I would add that: advanced civilization would need a partially oxidizing atmosphere, not too wet as well. We would be nowhere without the ability to control fire.
Wobbling rotation axis of earth creating seasons is an important sequence in life formation
@@blacksmith67it would be interesting to see how advanced a civilization could get if they never discovered fire. Could a different path through technology lead to some pretty neat inventions
Recent models call into question that whole Jupiter blocking asteroids thing. Don't remember the details but there was a video on antons channel a while back
Actually this affects complex life variable, not planet suitable for life.
Without plate tectonics the planet is still suitable for life but not complex life and there is a higher risk of it becoming unsuitable for life.
The Earth is so cool and fascinating. I don’t think I’ll ever live on another planet!
🌎
You definitely won’t live on another planet. No one will.
The human race as a species is biologically made to live on the earth. In any event it’s the only planet in the universe where you can find dogs, so it’s the only place for me.
Plate tectonics is very useful for building a technological civilization. First of all, it brings the metals to the surface. But still, volcanism similar to the one on Venus would do this anyway. Maybe not as effectively but that would be still something.
Previous video on granite lubricating the plates . Witch was formed by melted lime
Yeah there's a lot that could bring metals to the surface. I'd argue that tectonics though , because they take CAN so long to reach the surface , can also hamper technological development.
Plate tectonics is also necessary for creating fossil fuels that are needed to fully take advantage of those metals. There would also need to be a carboniferous-like period to produce all the plant life that is the basis for fossil fuels. A planet can have a lot of iron on it's surface but without coal it can't be turned into steel.
@@robo5013 There's such an idea as what if there was no oil? I think it's called a Steampunk world. But it's possible we could have been in a world with no coal either. In which case wood would be turned into charcoal then used to fire the furnace or smelter. But would it be a bad thing if the Industrial Revolution had occurred slowly over hundreds of years?
@@sandal_thong8631also people have seemed to survive a good long bit without oil, so no reason to postulate it needs to be there for civilization to occur
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you.
As an old geographer, I have been thinking along these lines a long time, and I am overjoyed to see it hitting the mainstream.
This may be the finest science channel on youtube. At least with this format. Always interesting, fascinating, and solid in it's research.
I've been thinking about trees in relation to the Fermi paradox. I think if trees never evolved, it would have been very hard for technological civilization to arise. We evolved hands in order to grab onto tree branches. Some of our oldest weapons and tools were made of wood. Wood has been used as a building material since always. The first forests on Earth fossilized and became coal, which we used to kickstart the industrial revolution. And there are probably many other reasons why trees have been enormously important for our evolution. Maybe there are tons of planets out there with life on them, but none of them just happened to evolve anything similar to trees.
What would prevent trees from evolving on every other planet?
The availability of easily accessible fossil fuels of some sort is likely a contributing factor to the advance of a technological civilisation.
@@FrostSpike
Yeah, but given how fossil fuels are produced, every planet with life with almost necessarily have fossil fuels, no?
Earth had bigger mammals (with bigger brains) before trees existed. It's more about diverse complexity that functions as a catalyst for intelligent and eventually technologically advanced life.
@@falseprophet1024 Possibly, but not necessarily. It took life on Earth a long time to evolve a fungal organism that could break down lignin so we had about 50M years during which trees would fall and simply lay around meaning that the wood could be subsequently buried and compressed into various types of coal. After that time, coal would only form when the tree fell into anaerobic conditions and doesn't have the same calorific content as the best anthracite. Even now, we have seen microorganisms that can break down crude oil into carbon-dioxide and water (even if incompletely), so a planet might get unlucky and get their reserves destroyed or depleted in some way.
Earth is rarer than previously imagined.
Much, much rarer. I'd guess there might only ever have been three technologically intelligent species in the galaxy and two of them are extinct.
@@davidbrisbane7206Its not rarer, Any Intelligent species can also exist in different environment different than earth With a suitable atmosphere, Active plate tectonics, and Warm temperature, it doesnt need to have the same environment like earth, carbon based life is common Around Terrestrial planets, while ammonia and silicon based life form is much rarer, so warm temperature Is The most Likely candidate for Alien life forms to exist, While Intelligent life require A much complex factors to exist In such Environment.
Earth is the jewel that hangs on the cheek of Night. Rare and precious and beautiful beyond compare.
And we pollute it like there's no tomorrow. And we take people and animals for granted instead of the wonderful rare beings that they truly are.
@@davidbrisbane7206 I figure each spiral galaxy produces 20 to 30 intelligent species throughout its life cycle, and we are probably #10 or #11 for the Milky Way. The next species will develop in about a billion years, long after we are gone.
@@cillyhoney1892Correct. Global priority is to stop using fossil fuels. How to get China and India to stop burning coal to generate energy? Maybe when the coal runs out?
i felt sad yesterday when i detected the slightest hint of you getting sick, and now this one today. just know this chica here in austin sends blessings for a speedy recovery & thanks for all i've learned through your channel-my fave! PS these researchers should define what they mean by "complex life," because when i look at the octopus, i'd take exception to the notion that complex life, perforce, requires land.
1st. usually complex life usually refers to multicelular life .i.e. progressing past single celled organisms. The video somewhat explains why the researchers believe that complex life requires continental land, as well as large oceans. I'd encourage you to read the paper for a better explanation.
2nd. What a loser lol "i felt sad yesterday when i detected the slightest hint of you getting sick" Who tf says shit like this.
Octopi are indeed impressive. I think they are smarter than we know. Have you seen the work people are doing with training their cats to use word buttons to "speak". I wonder if someone could do this for an octopus -- no telling what they'd have to say.
@@bradarmstrong3952i'm aware of that with cats but haven't seen it yet… and as for octopi, i know there are several folks who are actively researching their intelligence with puzzles, etc., and (at least inho) it's 100% alien life right here among us! sometimes i really do wonder if humans really *are* adapted at all (especially when the internet went down yesterday, and folks couldn't buy gas or food or make calls and just starred off absently into the blurry distance).
This is also link to the phosphorus rare earth solution, since phosphorus is critical to anything with a skeleton, and phosphorus comes from the weathering of continental crust. Weathering, of course, speeds up with erosion, and erosion speeds up with elevation. So mountain chains directly lead to skeletons
Why does life need to evolve the way it did on earth? Just because we have never encountered other types of life, doesn't mean they do not exist.
If humans only look for life that is similar to ours, that is all we will find. Keeping open minds is in our own interests. If the universe is truly stranger than we can imagine...
Thank you, Anton!
Hard to look for something if we have no idea how to tune our equipment to find it because we have no idea what it is ;)
I think there is quite good understanding of chemistry of all the elements in periodic table. Turns out there is no life on Earth without carbon and everything is based on some form of DNA(RNA). If there was life that is constructed somewhat different wouldn't we have any example of those here on our planet?
A bit like asking why we look for stars that are made of hydrogen just because our sun is like that. Because that's just how stars are. Life is likely fairly similar or at least follows the same processes.
Billions of galaxies and some say there is nobody out there just us lmfao
The Universe is so huge and hard to grasp that we struggle to even write fiction around our current understanding of it.
@@dingickso4098 Is it easy to grasp the amount of very specific and "lucky" conditions that had to happen in certain order for us to be here, and things that had to NOT happen in the process for us to STILL be here?
I think that's the biggest problem. People have it pretty easy to understand how ridiculously huge the cosmos is. Way easier than understanding how fkin far we are from single cellular organisms and from conditions for those to emerge from dead matter.
We are pretty sure that live can only develop at a border between liquid and solid. Liquids and gases can not hold structures, while solids can not change. There are some changes inside solids, but they are so slow that we would not recognise them as changes.
This limits live to planets where there is a liquid at the surface, which limits the possible distance to the star.
Plate tectonics is mainly due to the collision with Thea and the resulting Moon. The Earth and Moon is basically a binary planet. Astronomers should thus look for binary planets in the habitable zone.
The universe is full of life and it is all around us. We however are very primitive and are by their law being treated like The Andaman Island, where they're not allowed to mess with us because we're supposed to develop on our own. But religion explains well how to speak to them. All the religious beings are ET. The human body houses a portion of the soul as part of its development. The universe is truly magical.
Like Pluto
The moon rings like a bell🤔
The depth of bigger craters are all about the same depth 🤔🤔
One half's denseness is different than the other .it just "happens" to be almost a perfect half looking away from us with that different density 🤔🤔
The rock on the top are older than the rocks excavated from a deeper depth 🤔🤔🤔 the moon is a strange place for sure ...
And not just that, but only the outskirts of the galaxy. No way anything's surviving constant gamma rays and supernovas.
earth and moon are a binary system
I’m a simple man that looks to the heavens and grateful you explain it. Goodnight.
So Theia hit around 4.5 billion years ago, and Plate Tectonics started around 4 billion years ago. That's a severe coincidence!
Theia's liquid core sunk into Earth's core, increasing its diameter . Also some parts of Theia 's mantle got trapped in Earth's. So Earth diameter increased, which cracked the solid crust, which was then now strained and out of static balance (since diameter changed, the solid crust over it was now "bumpy" and will exert lateral forces to expand. You just kickstarted the thermal engine of plate tectonics.
Juste an hypothesis.
Maybe the less dense rocks were blown to the side of the Earth opposite the impact, creating the continental masses, whilst excavating a dip in the denser rock on the side of the impact. The whole crust likely became molten for a while but perhaps the differences lasted just long enough to "stick". The new Luna formed from the impact debris in close orbit and then global tidal forces, the 1cm/s^2 acceleration might not seem much but it's 300x more than today, wreaked havoc on the cooling Earth pulling and pushing on the newly formed crust causing it to crack and fragment. Well, perhaps.
Yes I think Theia's energy is what makes the core molten enough for plate tectonics to occur. Adding Theia's core to earths also is a big factor in our magnetic field.
@@billshiff2060 It wouldn't surprise me if cratons were fragments of Theia's core that were driven into the heart of Terra.
The Luna-forming collision between Earth and Theia blasted some of Earth's crust into orbit. One of the later Apollo missions (the only one with a Geologist) found earth crustal material on the Moon.
The more we know about life, the more likely it is that we are all alone. Love these Fermi paradox videos!
The take away seems to be: you need complex environments, to support complex life, in order that it can survive complex environmental conditions, so that they can become complex. Sure adds a layer of complexity.
I love your videos and enjoy your voice, but everytime I think I'm more confused than before watching, and not cuz if any bad complaints, but cuz what you talk about and explain, blows my febbel lil mind!!!
SMARTEST MAN ON RUclips
Thank you for recognizing me
smart men are open minded deep thinking ....
Yes yes I'm here
He's the least full of bs for absolute certainty.
Just a super capable man doing his best which = positive results
No agendas, no ulterior motives, just education, debate and informed discussions.
@@JrobAlmighty OMG this is literally me!
This was in the 2000 book, "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe"
Yep. The more I hear the more I am convinced of the rare earth hypothesis.
Every Fermi Paradox argument ultimately comes down to the rare earth hypothesis.
@@M167A1More than just a rare earth. Rare would imply it still happens somewhere else. One string of rare events after another happened over and over and if a single one didnt happen we probably wouldnt be here. But yet when we look outward we see none of the rare events happening. No exoplanet with seasons, etc… its not just a rare earth, it’s borderline impossible.
Yeah, this is not a new theory
One of my favorite
Earth wasn't made for life. Life was made for. Earth. And earth was made for life by life
A large moon that stabilizes the planet's rotation is also critical. The Drake Equation fails to take into account many requirements for advanced technological life to exist. Advanced life is exceedingly RARE.
Exactly. It seems very common that exo planets they find are tidally locked because they don't have a large moon.
My man! You know it
For several decades my solution to the Fermi Paradox has been that subterranean life (extremophiles) is common, but surface life is rare. Tectonics causes life to rise to the surface. Having an atmosphere and oceans all allows surface life to thrive. Finally a relatively stable surface allows the development of life onwards to complexity.
This is the first time I've come across a direct relationship to the Drake equation, but the idea that plate tectonics encouraged the evolution of greater intelligence in human ancestors, specifically in the region around Ethiopia has been around for decades.
Interesting. My laymen's theory is that because Earth is in a remote part of the galaxy, our planet is not periodically sterilized by super novi and similar phenomenon. Other planets develop life, but before it can evolve to the point it produces radio waves, etc., it is sterilized.
I agree. Microbial life is out there but that's it. Most of the stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs which tend to emit much less solar activity and their planets appear to be tidally locked where one side always faces the dwarf star, thereby leading to extreme temperatures. We are unique folks.
I think the reason Earth has plate tectonics while so many other planets don't is because we collided with a large body during a specific point in the solar systems (and our planet's) creation. If we were hit before or after this point, Thea would simply mold into earth and would only increase earths size, or would shatter earth into chunks of rock and gas made into many smaller objects, both leading to no plate tectonics. This collision happed at just the right time to perfectly stir up the surface and inner layers in a way that kept it fractured and a moon that ensured the plates remained separated and dynamic with its gravitational/rotational influence. Most other worlds have their surfaces melded together.
Interesting thought.
The smashing into rocks and gas is what happened with Theia
If this is the reason for life and that life is incredibly rare that is scary for our sake, because people are caught up in wars fighting each other when our existence is amazing. We need to preserve humanity but then again I will always stand by my theory of existence in which for matter to exist, for energy to exist, for anything to exist there must be no beginning. Therefore you can point at a linear timeline during this universe of our beginning but that is not the beginning of matter and energy. Before our universe is the unknown but without a doubt I believe existence is infinite therefore statistically there will be infinite occurrences of similarities.
Something doesn't come from nothing but what if there was always the Something
The more we learn about the universe and our planet, The more the "Rare Earth theory" becomes the more logical answer to as why we still don't discover other intelligent life out there
I never really considered it, with the term "earth like planet/s" thrown around so often, but earth truly is very unique. Our planet so much more complex than its mass and it having water on its surface. An inpact with another planet sized object billions of years ago, plate tectonics, and so much more are likely reasons for life on earth and why the planet is seemingly special.
fucking facinating. A sensible paper that basically points toward plate tectonics being "the great filter".
You don't know the concept of the Great filter do You???
Since we just started looking a few minutes ago should we truly be surprised we haven’t found anyone yet? Not to mention that our ET sensors are puny. 🤔
thank you for real science videos. they don't seem particularly biased. to the point, easy to understand, poignant.
A brilliant solution is to be found in a recent paper by the Italian astrophysicist Amedeo Balbi: combustion is really rare in the universe because most planets dont have enough oxygen in their atmospheres, so fire (and consequently advanced civilizations) can't be common
it's becoming increasingly apparent that the Earth and even our Solar System is an outlier and very uncommon.......
Interesting hypothesis. Thank you.
Thank you Anton for your research and creating this video! 👍🏻😊
The moon has been receding from the Earth since its creation, which is thought to have happened ~4.5bn years ago. Therefor, it was once _much_ closer to Earth, and orbited much faster (the "month" would have been tens of hours to a few days long). Earth's day would have been as short as five hours long. The very close proximity would have raised *monstrous* tides. It seems quite likely that the stresses on the Earth's crust could have prevented it from ever solidifying into a thick, unyielding surface, pierced only by the occasional volcanic hot spot. Keeping the surface young, bringing up water from the interior, sequestering carbon, etc. Another important aspect of the presence of the moon is that it stabilizes the rotation of the Earth, keeping the axial tilt at around 23 degrees for billions of years. Thank you, moon!
Get well soon
Even if plate activity isn't one of the required ingredients for intelligent life, I would imagine that evolution would be very, very slow on a planet without plate activity. Evolution kinda needs changing environmental conditions, and I don't know that a single-plate world changes enough to encourage natural selection to do it's thang.
Assuming he actually have ten planets in our system, then a rough inference is that 10% of all planets everywhere have tectonics. Not a small number.
Proposing 'rarity of tectonics' as a Fermi solution is like 30 years ago saying that we didn't 'see' that many planets out there.
Knew you would be talking about this soon, thanks for sharing!
Alien: “you sure they can’t see us?”
Aliens: “no, they have no idea we’re even here! Know what that means?”
Alien3: “shirtless party!!” ☺️
You did a video on this life created lime that melted into granite that lubricated the plates
I'm like 100% sure that the Theia impact event is the solution to the Fermi Paradox.
The ramifications of that event, including the tides, plate tectonics, addition of important minerals, a shield from later impactors, changes to our spin - and the list goes on - I think may have been essential to the formation of complex life.
The prevalence of life in the universe is based on how special that type of event really is. Because it might not just be that a collision needs to occur between two bodies similar to Theia and proto-Earth, it might also require a specific window of impact speeds and angles.
..... We could be exceptionally rare..... or we could be only fairly rare.
Listening to Anton makes me calm
Amazing!
I would love to know Anton’s favorite explanation for Fermi’s paradox.
Probably the pizza breakdown.
Where civilization only continues to advance when good food (pizza) is invented
You are watching it.
It's not just plate tectonics that life needs. It also needs a moon in the exact right place to create tidal function of the right levels that allows life to get stuck in rock pools, forcing it to move on to land.
Not only that, it needs regular mass extinctions in order to clear out the giant predators stage of life, clearing the way for species that might have a chance to develop civilisation. Also there needs to be a few hundred million years of development in order to create fossil fuels because even with civilisation, without fossil fuels, no species is going anywhere.
The number of planets in the universe is irrelevant when the conditions for civilised life are extremely exacting.
The Drake equation is only an exercise in how to address the problem. It does not provide an answer, because more than one of its multiplicative terms are essentially unconstrained. If we ever succeed in bracketing *all* the terms with decent error bars, then we might get somewhere; until then, the Drake equation remains a target, an aspiration.
Aliens are better off without us.
What if we are first?
I graduated from high school shortly before plate tectonics was accepted by Geologists. I didn’t know until about 1980.
Recently I started following a Pacific Northwest Geology teacher on RUclips. He is not a field geologist but he has many as guests as well as some from related fields. Among them have been those in a field using technology that seems to be able kind of look into the layers inside the planet. There seem to be some very massive lumps of stuff as well as possible bits of old plates that didn’t subduct enough to melt. They think the massive lumps might be remains of the planetoid theorized to have collided with earth and caused a large chunk to break off and become our moon.
The various layers and what they do would have to be affected by those massive and uneven chunks. They, more than the impact, seem to be the main reason, to this uneducated person, for not only the multiple plates but for how they move around without a pattern. Like water flowing around moving rocks.
I very well can imagine scientists on a planet without tectonic figuring the impossibility of life on a tectonic planet
Anton: "Today we're are going to talk about a new fascinating theory. But first, what is 'talking' exactly? Talking is a process whereby ideas are shared through sounds made with the mouth. What is a mouth? A mouth is..."
What Hubris… Why would any advanced civilization lower themselves to speak to humans…
I think it’s funny that you assume that they wouldn’t act just like us
You wouldn't want to understand the thoughts of an ant, if it has any?
Yes... It's not like humans have taught some sign language to chimps. Or have worked on communicating with dolphins and whales. 😂
Why do we interact with and study squirrels, ants, jellyfish, elephants???
Take care, Wonderful Anton. Summer colds are the WORST.
YOU. you always keep my attention until the end. thats a hard to thing to do sir. thank you
That was very interesting! Thanks Anton! 😊❤
Wonderful as always Anton. Thank you. 🙂
My friend Dianna the planetary geologist told me about plate tectonics and how they are responsible for life on this planet in 1989. That's why Mars died and lost it's atmosphere and water. No plate tectonics to move the volcanoes around.
So this isn't really a new idea. The paper exploring the science of it is new, but plate tectonics being responsible for life on this planet has been a well known concept for awhile now.
Damn right; in the Drake equation, Fp, the proportion of "habitable planets" is a red herring. The definition of "habitable" is waaaay too optimistic. Usually they define it as being a rocky planet with water, atmosphere and temperature that allows water to be liquid. As suggested in this video, perhaps plate techtonics are necessary for complex life. I would say that spin is also needed: A planet that is spin-locked to its star would have an extremely hot side and an extremely cold side, and could only host life along a thin boundary between the two extremes; and this boundary could move more rapidly than the speed of motion its life has managed to evolve at any given time. That, plus a big, heavy moon.
So when people talk about Drake's equation predicting 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy, I think of maybe 10,000 planets having some form of life, like archea, mold and viruses. Even bacteria are probably too complex to have evolved many places. Cyanobacteria maybe ...
Does mars have mountains
Earth is insanely rare. It is not hubris to realize life on Earth is so mind boggling special that we may well be the most advance civilization in the galaxy at the moment.
Key word being "at the moment." The Universe has not entered its prime time of life giving worlds yet. If we survive, there is a good chance that in the ages to come *we* will be the "ancient aliens" that visit other words
Awesome video, Anton!
Putting the Drake Equation to rest is long overdue. At best, it was an interesting thought experiment, appropriate for the time of its proposal. In practice, it's an incomplete series of gueses multiplied by each other, based on a data set of exactly one.
Hello wonderful Anton, these are your viewers
Someone made earth special
Thank you for the content. Im watching you since 2 years. This is my first comment here :)
Greetings from Germany
Great video !
The Drake equation is totally incorrect.
i think it does not have moons in the equation ?
Its diffecult enough finding intelligent life on this planet
Great geotopic, thank you Anton
I've always had a strong opinion that the popularity of high Drake Equation estimates is very similar to the draw of religion. It isn't about what we expect to see, it's about what we want to see. We even have Sagan's famous quote about wasted space if we are alone. And that's why we have had such strong certainty in the face of such large unknowns.
8:18 note that the fact that this was the only way we know it could occurr on earth does not necessarily mean its the only way it could occur anywhere else
the whole argument covered here is life as we know it. JWST already highlighted the fact we know squat of what's out there.
@@TheDemontr1 The only scientific way to discuss the possibility of life anywhere is using what we know. Anything else is fantasizing.
@robo5013 having that mindset limits our search. Feel free to extrapolate but don't stipulate what's out there MUST be like here. It's like you looking around your house and conclude the whole world must be the same.
@@TheDemontr1 How can we search for something that we don't have a scientific basis for? We can only search for what we know works based on science, not what we wish could be true. I, and scientists, are using the scientific method while you are fantasizing.
@robo5013 I think you misunderstood. You absolutely have to use the scientific method but to draw the conclusion life can only be x is not a good approach. It's science fiction till it's not because by that time the facts would support it.
The last thing you would want is a closed minded scientist.
I find it closed minded to think that the only path to and through life is our way. I suspect the universe is still far more clever than we give it credit for.
Absolutely agree!
Wishful thinking is all you have when given information that contradicts your worldview.
It is not closed minded to use what we can scientifically verify. You are not being open minded but fantasizing.
When I tapped this OC in, I expected to get actually quite a bit more push back, but here is my counter argument.
1. The state of 'Science' as it is currently accepted is not absolute. Indeed many of the 'facts' we understand today are not the 'facts' of yesterday.
Just in my lifetime alone, dinosaurs have gone from being slow moving reptiles living only in swamps, to a world full of vibrant, top of every food chain masters of the world. Truly the 'Terrors of Terra'.
Black holes went from obscure egghead math to dominating galactic evolution.
Plate Tectonics and Epigenetics didn't even exist as scientific fields.
Before Star Trek (scientifically speaking), there were just stars... and maybe a couple planets around a few of them. Today, the skies are filled with planets (stellar system bound and rogue). A far cry from the once commonly held belief that the universe revolved around the Earth, and that Earth was IT.
Point being that what we "KNOW" today may turn out to be tomorrow's "Bwahahahahhaha".
2. Science was, is , and always shall be an offshoot of Natural Philosophy. As such it remains a system of belief as concrete as any other form of religion, but still just a system of belief. It's adherents (which I count myself amongst) often forget that it is not perfect carryall of truth, and thus requires "Belief" that the system is at least the closest to the truth of all possibilities. It doesn't necessarily follow that the Theories du Jour are in fact truth.
I do appreciate your POV however. Hey, Gravity is a fact. It is truth... in as much as we can observe truth from our current perspective. The problem is that we have no means of perception beyond a limited scope of view. It could turn out that gravity is actually a small scale localized phenomenon and not really relevant to the 'big picture', or maybe it still is. Hard to tell from the inside.
The fact that life DID happen here (and in such a wide variety) proves that it DOES happen.All it takes is some energy and a bit of lucky chemistry. That doesn't mean it's the only lucky chemistry there is, or that these are the only conditions under which genesis can occur.
The difference between the open and closed mind is that one attempts to discover truth, while the other tries to dictate it.
@@thomasgoodwin2648 I don't know how old you are, I'm 52, but when I was a kid no one thought that dinosaurs only lived in swamps and that they were all slow moving. Ah yes, the whole we believed the Earth was the center of the Universe during the Middle Ages is proof that science is often wrong argument: that was before the creation and adoption of scientific method which puts it into the category of philosophy, or just best guesses before experimental methods were created to prove or disprove a hypothesis and not pointing to one book containing fairy tales as the ultimate source of knowledge. That is basically what Natural Philosophy was but it was replaced by scientific method, it is no longer a part of actual science.
This is why you don't understand why real scientists are looking for signs of life using what we know to be true about life. That is being scientific. It does not mean that they are closed minded. In fact, if they are closed minded they wouldn't be looking at all. How would you go about looking for signs of life by looking for things that we don't know to be true? How would we know if those things we observe are indicators of life at all? We couldn't. The only way we could find out that life is different than how it works on Earth would be to directly observe it. If we want to spend our very limited resources looking for life outside of Earth then we need to look for places where we know it could be possible. Otherwise we would have to send missions to every planetary body and as you pointed out there are quite a few. The notion that there could be other methods for life to form isn't being open minded but using the ideas that were prevalent in the field of Natural Philosophy, which was just fantasizing, not using scientific method which is how we study what is true not what we wish to be true.
Awesome vid. Thanks.
Excellent informativ video,thanks 👍🤗
Governments would never admit Aliens exist even if they visited earth, and made contact with us.
Thankyou for another wonderful video Anton.
❤️👍
They probably would
Great summaries of a lot of science I am unfamiliar with, Anton.
Advanced civilizations that can leave their planet require availability of high density energy sources. If a planet never experiences a Cambrian period, then coal may never form. Likewise, if there are not a multitude of great extinction events, oil and gas may not form. It would be very difficult to leave the planet with plant life (wood) as your sole source of energy.
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is actually quite simple - more advanced civilizations no longer utilize the technologically primitive methods of communication we use, and that's why we don't see them. We scour the skies searching for other civilizations utilizing communication methods we would use, however we may well be using (and looking for) the technological equivalent of smoke signals.
I'm certainly not saying there are definitely intelligent alien civilizations all around us, but certainly they would be utilizing technologies we likely couldn't even comprehend, including for communication.
The Thea impact that formed the Moon following by plate tectonics seems like an extremely specific chain of events thus possibly solving the Fermi paradox.
Thank you anton... u explain so well thank you.❤
I've been using the PT argument for decades. There are other important considerations: like the interaction of water at subduction zones, the effects PT has on mixing and concentration on important minerals (like metals), and the effects it has on renewing landforms (mtn building and erosion) that bring those minerals w/in reach of 'life'. The FP is kind of a joke, but it does work as a vehicle for the discussion about how intelligence can evolve into intelligent life with the capabilities necessary to communicate across interstellar space...
Plate tectonics was already part of my rare Earth equation. I also hypothesized that our huge moon is responsible for plate tectonics. Also that a possible way to calculate its effect on plate tectonics would be to see if it drifting further away had an effect on it. This could be what is helping to keep our core moulton which is responsible for our magnetic field.
This would make having a large moon nearly essential to cimplex life.
Wow! Fascinating. Thank you.
Basically another addition to the rare earth hypothesis.
This time with some additional link to why it's important for [complex] life formation.
Other include low sun activity (not a typical g star), order of big/small palanet in the solar system (small near the sun and large farther away), large moon (tide), etc. but those do not have an explicit link with life formation that was proven. The new one (plate tectonics) at least has some correlation.
Okay this is actually incredible and changes a lot of things about how we understand the possibilities of other civilizations. Our geological situation is sooo unique, definitely can't be just any green planet as some people think
Thank you, Theia. Once again. I'd say definitely a strong correlation, not yet causation, but maybe a little more digging and we will find the evidence.
Great book on the shift in ideas from Permanantism to Plate Tectonics is Homer Le Grande's "Drifting Continents and Shifting Theories"
Interesting theoretical idea. I think complex life could do fine along multiple paths. I lean toward the "Dark Forest" hypothesis to explain the paradox.
Great one today
The true definition of life is elusive and the answer...its not exactly clear why life exists anyway, this would explain why its present here, but apparently not much elsewhere...not even scrathcing the surface of intelligent life.