The Fermi Paradox: Rare Complexity
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- Опубликовано: 20 мар 2024
- Life is incredibly complicated, but for most of Earth’s history it was much simpler. Is it possible the Universe is full of planets with very simple life, and complex organisms are rare?
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Credits:
The Fermi Paradox: Rare Complexity
Episode 439; March 21, 2024
Produced, Written & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur
Editor: Darius Said
Music Courtesy of
Epidemic Sound epidemicsound.com/creator
Lombus, "Cosmic Soup" 
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The last time I was this early, there was only one first rule of warfare.
😂
Rule 1. Refer to rules A--Zxyz12a(c.)
That first rule is that there is never just one first rule.
Sorry, got to go. I hear a hand clapping...
OG
The first rule of warfare is to never assume any rule of warfare to not be first and most important
As a biochemist, I can confidently say that I think that the "Rare complexity" is guaranteed to be Fermi Paradox's filter. I don't know if it's The Great Filter, but it definitely plays a role and I would say there are 3 key arguments as to why:
1. The microbic extremophiles and the niche biological pathways they utilise
2. The period between the emergence of prokaryotic and eukaryotic life
3. How eukaryotic life evolved in the first place
We had found life in the most unlikely of places on Earth, with biological pathways that in the past were thought to be impossible. This leads me to believe that simple life must actually be quite common across the universe, and it's simply that the methodologies we use at the moment to search for life are too biased towards Earth-like life. (Look up the Viking mission false positives)
Next, the emergence of eukaryotic life happened over a very long period of time and was a result of a lifestyle that unlocked new biological niches, not simple mutations. The same sort of niches could potentially never be available on non-Earth like planets and therefore more complex life would never be able to emerge.
Endosymbiosis that created eukaryotic cells and mitochondria was a result of a symbiotic relationship between an ancient archaea and aerobic bacteria which provided an excess of energy that the prokaryotic organisms were not able to achieve on their own. This newfound excess of energy was the first stepping stone in eukaryotic evolution which allowed for further adaptations that increased the rate of evolution (chromosomes, sexual reproduction, genetic recombination and so on) and the organism complexity. The oxygenated atmosphere was a major drive force in this process. Oxygen is actually very damaging to the DNA, and during the Great Oxidation Event organisms had to develop mechanisms for DNA repair first.
Therefore, could complex life emerge in anaerobic conditions? It's very unlikely that anything resembling the complex life on Earth could evolve on a planet or moon without the oxygen cycle in its biosphere. Aerobic metabolic pathways are just simply far more energy efficient than the anaerobic ones. We had never found the evidence of anaerobic organisms achieving higher complexity, and the very few examples of anaerobic eukaryotes most likely evolved from aerobic ancestors and lost their mitochondria.
In conclusion, life can survive even in the harshest conditions, but the complex one requires very specific circumstances which very few places may have.
The idea that ecology drives evolution rather than environment is really fascinating, and opens up a lot of interesting questions about the mechanisms involved in an upward spiral like that.
is that a 2nd chicken or egg question, though? Does the oxygen cycle need O2 producing life to build up a planet's oxygen?
Thanks for taking the time to write that!
@@michealnelsonauthorthe egg chicken scenario comes up quite often when discussing the origin of life. Eg proteins / nucleic acids.
Could there be a oxygen alternative? That an organism produces energy in some different way, but while still utilising some gas from its enviroment?
this is my favorite "solution". planets with multi- cellular organisms (plants/invertebrates) are rare.. but "intelligence" even rarer in that group..
So, no intelligent single celled group minds?, huh, I must be the only guy who's afraid of colony organisms...😐😑😐
Mine too.
I think both should be common.
Symbiosis is very common, so it should be easy for similar bacteria to cooperate too. There could be many advantages. Once that's done, it makes a lot of sense to specialize, that's common too (see ants for example). Now the only remaining step is reproduction on the community level. Or it could be the other way around. There are organisms that live as single cells, but form a larger organism to reproduce.
Once that's done, communication becomes important. With chemical signals first, but electricity is easy and orders of magnitude faster. From there, specialization creates a nervous system. As that grows, centralized processing can easily arise. And once you have a brain, it just has to grow and specialize further. We are just learning from AI research that intelligence emerges automatically if you have a big enough brain. The latest large AI models even show signs of consciousness.
In general, it seems the usual way nature increases complexity is multiplication followed by specialization. This process is absolutely everywhere. It's easy to make more of what you already have, and then it's easy to slowly change each instance in different directions.
That's my sense of the Fermi Paradox. And in the intelligent life sector tool using may not be as common as we think.
Intelligence isnt even rare on earth, millions of species have it.
24:05 there is a family of multicellular prokaryotes called Actinomycetes. They are weird with thousands of transcriptionally switched off secondary metabolites genes that produce (if experimentally switched on) many potentially useful biocompounds. Studying the genomes of those multicellular bacteria is like a tresure hunt. They deserve their own episode.
Combination of this and "We're just early in the trillion+ year lifespan of the universe" are my favoured explanations. To my mind, the idea that eventually the universe will be teeming with life (both Terran-derived and the truly alien) but that at the moment, we're one of the first that breached anything smarter than pond scum (at least in our neighbourhood) seems the likeliest explanation.
It's worth pointing out that that is merely the Fermi Paradox slightly reframed from "Why isn't anybody else here?" to "Why isn't anybody else here _yet?"_
I like that as explanation too, it might be that it just takes 14 billion years to get life that is visible to other stars. With all the supernovae and planetary forming from the dust necessary to get earth.
What about the snacks and drink
Complex snacks never developed in this episode.
They feel so short 😢 I could listen for hours to Fermi's Paradox!!!
Excellent book - "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (2003)"
It was sometime in the early 80’s when my interest in science really started to kick in. I voraciously read hardcore textbooks on dozens of topics. Then I came across the concept of Fermi’s Paradox in a science fiction story and it flummoxed my young mind for years. When the discussion of Great Filters started gearing up, and so many were presented, it occurred to me how potentially rare we are. It also occurred to me that not one single filter may be the answer, but possibly a combination of them. You could hit the jackpot in every other way, as we did, but one single species-destroying or stunting event ends it all. One single limiting-circumstance and you get no better advancement, for the entire lifetime of a life-bearing planet, than an earthworm. I can understand the position of those who think we’re the only ones in this galaxy. It’s absolutely possible. I’m leaning in that direction myself.
Except for onions which have about 4.9x the size of genome than Humans do, the human genome is around 15.9Gb for an onion vs 3.2Gb for a whole human genome. And garlic which has about 1.94x the size of an onion genome at 30.9Gb which is about 9.66x the human genome.
I get why Onions are complex, its because they have layers, but the garlic thing confuses me.
Hey, Cakes have layers!
Why don't Sequence cake?
That's strange, the ChatDNA5.5 says my cake is a symbiont of a Grass, Bovine, and thermally aborted small Dinosaur?
Note that the onion layers are all near-identical, that not complex.
There's a grass with a genome the size of the onion, and there are subtle celled creatures with genome around the same size as ours. Physical complexity doesn't determine genome size.
This is my favourite solution since it fits the rest of our observations (history of chemistry, life, intelligence and technology on Earth and in the Solar system)
but is also quite simple (i.e. minimal parsimony).
And also one my professors think is likely
You know? Despite all his contributions to science, technology, human progress, philosophy and so on, still Enrico Fermi remains also-unknown for the vast majority of the people of this world.
I mean he literally made it possible the victory of the US in WW2 and the Americans? "Let's make a movie for Oppenheimer!" 😮💨
Honestly, I think Fermi was a bit full of himself.
But so was the guy who removed the appendix that was trying to kill me, and I appreciate him very much :)
"Get that cry baby outta here"
They named an element after him.
nah ww2 was won by the soviets..the US won the post-war
@@kayakMike1000and a prestigious laboratory
Lol, loved the image of the hunter gather alien with his skull ear and “dog”.
The soundtrack on this one SLAPS! Definitely love the nasa-punk trek-style space opera feels. Definitely compliments the amazing video content.
Thanks for another uplifting episode!
I always look forward to every new Fermi paradox video!
Adaptation is driven by change. The fact that the Earth's environment is as chaotic as it is may be what drove that jump to multicellular life. Once over that hurdle life might be able to create its own choas, but the first jump is a bit of a mystery.
But if you consider that many places we consider potentially life-bearing probably have fairly static environments over geologic time, there's good reason to believe multi-cellular life could be rare.
I think that the fundamental things are less dependent on chaos, there's so little in their incredibly simple structure that they don't really develop mitochondria or multicellularity because of some pressure like a change in climate. But I think an even better argument against it is that having one of those things is such a massive world changing advantage over your monocellular prokaryotic peers that the environment doesn't really matter, you get it and you now basically are the embodiment of an "I win" button for early life. So there's no unique pressure needed to evolve it, and once it does, you get to spread without much impedance for at least a little while.
@TheMyrmo
Would the chaos not make multi-cellular life _more_ unlikely? Or are you saying it's the fact that the chaos gave them the edge?
@@ivoryas1696 Being a deathworlder means you SURVIVED coming from a deathworld. There's a case to be made that earth-life could be hyper-advanced just as a result of our planet constantly trying to murder us.
@@ivoryas1696 Changes in the environment promote change in the organisms as the ones who have the biology to survive pass on their genes and the ones who can't die.
@@yalexander9432
Yes, but _too _*_much_* change and there's _no_ selection, because everyone dies.
I was mostly stating this under the assumption that single-celled organisms are generally more flexible in survivability, but it depends, tbh, so I'm not saying the point he was making was moot.
Time to dream of the Fermi Paradox. Thanks again! 😊
the grains of sand analogies harrowed my brain in a good way.
Very illuminating episode even for the legendary fermi series!
Humans have to stop being worried about the wrong things and put differences aside and help one another we are the most precious resource in the universe
"we are the most precious resource in the universe"
that is so vague, it is not even wrong. It is simply meaningless w0rd salad.
@@istvansipos9940 be kind and help anyone you can without hurting yourself the simplest explanation are often the best
@@istvansipos9940 be kind and help anyone you can without hurting yourself sometimes the answer to a situation most be addressed on an individual level and they often are the simplest something anyone can do and afford.
@@istvansipos9940 be kind and help anyone you can without hurting yourself sometimes the answer to a situation most be addressed on an individual level and they often are the simplest something anyone can do and afford.
@@istvansipos9940 be kind help anyone you can with out hurting yourself individually often the simple solution is the best I’m sure whatever solution you might have is probably a word salad i know it’s difficult to be nice for some people
Surely a combination of this and just a few other FP solutions will make the maths add up?
Nothings wrong with the math, it’s amazing we have the FP math at all. I am a fan of the dark forest FP
We still have a few variables in the Drake equation that have WAG as their error bars.
We are making good progress on Fp. Starting to work on Ne, but the rest past that are stuck in the the deep Anthropic Principle swamp of sample size = 1.
I think TECHNOLOGY advanced enough for interstellar communication or travel is extremely rare. The SETI institute keeps listening for radio signals but our own world would have been unable to meet that criteria even a century ago. I think that almost all life in the universe is extremely low tech.
The problem with that is that it would have to be universally true. What is the likelihood of intelligent life all staying low tech?
The biggest rub to answers to the Fermi paradox is that it has to apply to potentially countless races.
@@icecold9511well maybe not that it’s rare, just so unquestionably hard that it might still be maybe millions of years before ANY species becomes a large interstellar species. I mean look at earth, why aren’t WE interstellar. I don’t think that there isn’t interstellar life, but it sure as hell might just be as difficult as looking for a needle in a hay stack, possible, and easy to given a magnet, but still super difficult
Life doesn't evolve at the same rate in different stages. Especially on different places or planets. We shouldn't assume all grow equally fast.
I know this statement to be fact. Everyone else should understand this instead of pretending like it isn't 100 percent known how life evolves elsewhere in this universe.... and every other universe for that matter.
Keep it trill brother.
@@caseypalmateer4515 That doesn't solve the paradox, because like they said, it will evolve in different rates in different places. The odds that every other planet with life evolves so much slower than Earth that intelligent life hasn't evolved yet is incredibly low. Hence the paradox.
@ASpaceOstrich how can we even say this. We only have a sample size of 1, and if we discover non intelligent alien life elsewhere in the solar system or the galaxy it would decrease the likelihood of intelligent life evolving in the universe.
Plus, would we even be able to distinguish a civilization from natural phenomenon ? Especially if they exist outside the galaxy ? With our current technology I highly doubt it, and it already assumes intelligent aliens would be messing with entire stars, which for all we know, could be a primitive way of energy consumption for them
@@ASpaceOstrichthe odds of life taking more time than us to reach equivalent milestones is incredibly low? Why? Please use a sample size of at least 2 each to support common and early abiogenesis and low diversity of rate of evolution for each "stage".
How early could the first rocky planets with sufficient elemental diversity for life have formed? Doubtfully too much earlier than we have if only because of the lack of heavy elements in the early universe (think pop. III and II star formation period) so earth seems to be early to the party in that regard as well.
@@dylanneely91 This is my personal theory for why the Fermi Paradox isn't a paradox too. Though the way you phrased it was weirdly hostile and smug. You know that wasn't the thing we were talking about in this thread right? We weren't talking about when life could have evolved, we were talking about the speed at which life that has appeared can become more complex. i.e. how long a generation takes and the rate at which mutations that cause increased complexity appear.
The theory that we're among the first makes the most sense to me, and is completely unrelated to the speed life can evolve at once it appears. Because it needs the heavy elements to appear at all.
If it turns out that 90% of all the life in this universe is single cell, I wouldn't be very surprised.
Great as always Isaac
This makes a lot of sense. Afterall, intelligent, technological life on Earth only came along after a few billion years. It makes sense that it is likely that it is very rare.
My first degree was in anthropology and I specifically focused on the evolution of intelligence in homo sapiens. Of course intelligent life is rare and life is rare and Earth is rare and the solar system is rare (turtles all the way down) but the more I researched, the more I came to the conclusion that the leap from normal complex life to human level intelligence is way steeper than we realize, perhaps the most steep and rarest thing to occur. To oversimplify the perfect conditions in the African rift at the perfect time in geology climate and evolution all had to converge. And you can somewhat see this when you realize the intelligence difference between a cow and a cat and a dog and a chicken are all within a certain level but then primate intelligence jumps up to be a massive outlier and then human intelligence jumps off the graph. Obviously life is rare, important, and should be cherished... But intelligent life? Words almost can't describe how insane it is. It's funny we are intelligent enough to be self loathing and wish to return to monkey at times. We don't realize what we are... Maybe we need another quantum leap in intelligence before we appreciate ourselves just as we appreciate chimpanzees for what they are ;)
Here’s a question for the Fermi paradox what if a civilization increases at the same speed develop at the same speed how long would it be before we were to read their signals? I feel like this would be a great question to ask in this type of situation. If they were more advanced than us it makes more sense that they could hide themselves from us or do whatever they want, but if they develop at the same speed how would we detect their waves sooner than they could detect ours in if there are multiple places at the same point how soon would it be before we were to pick up radio signals, or any other signals that we may send out in the use something similar they may be completely different than us, but what if they are the same as us maybe not in looks or DNA but with technology, I really love your channel. I fall asleep to it a lot and dream about a lot of crazy awesome things while listening to your videos, it’s like my bedtime stories, but I truly do enjoy your videos and these are just questions that I have
IMO Earth, with our weirdly proportioned moon and accompanying tidal energy, is as close to unique as it gets.
Also IMO, intelligence is rare because it’s a “bad” evolutionary strategy. It rarely wins against bigger, faster, stronger (like maybe when the dominant species gets wiped out by an asteroid but smaller species are spared).
Plus we’re early in the universe.
This is probably the most thought provoking video of yours that I've watched since "The Fermi Paradox: The Phosphorus Problem" one. I do have some points that I'd like to get out there though.
First it should probably be noted that evolutionary change isn't limited to reproduction. For mammals and such, mutations accrue over time in your cells and is often referred to as cellular mosaicism. Mutations can often occur during the division of a cell but also can occur from recoverable incidents(i.e. like DNA being damaged and repaired incorrectly or incompletely). So the analogy of generations of bacteria being compared to generations of mammals isn't a good one for that reason. Cell numbers(although larger animals tend to have more genes to resist mutation as a necessity), time span and number of genes(which you did cover) that can potentially be mutated would be a better thing to compare between the two and makes it all less massive of a difference. Working in the favor of bacteria though, from what I remember RNA is more prone to mutating/errors when copying than DNA is and almost all bacteria utilize RNA.
Secondly on Eukaryotes though: There are bacteria that exist today that have specimens that almost get to be an inch long that have pseudo-nuclei and evolved to use DNA instead of RNA. Thiomargarita magnifica would be the specific bacteria in mind that I'm thinking of, but that genus itself utilizes DNA over RNA and it's not the only genus of abnormally large bacteria either. If Parakaryon myojinensis turns out to not be a Eukaryote(and also is proven to be real and not some weird issue with its retrieval/study) then that also means that there is another, diverging lineage of cells on our planet that convergently evolved many Eukaryotic traits and potentially also endosymbiotic prokaryotes to aid it. Endosymbiotic bacteria also convergently have evolved in a few eukaryotic lineages, eukaryotic algae being an example you mentioned in the video but then you also have Pelomyxa. Pelomyxa lack mitochondria entirely, despite being eukaryotes, and instead utilize completely different endosymbiotic bacteria whilst living in low oxygen conditions and getting to be big enough to be visible to the naked eye in some cases.
Lastly, it may also be the case that multicellular life may have emerged very early to when it's though Eukaryotes evolved, or at least macroscopic life. The Francevillian biota and whether or not it represents fossils of actual macroscopic life is still debated from what I remember but the formation those supposed fossils come from is over 2 billion years old and there are trace fossils of macroscopic trails that are well over a billion years old(long before bilateral animal life is thought to have emerged). In that latter case that would suggest not only macroscopic life but also motile macroscopic life. Multicellular life has also been observed to be able to be selected for to evolve in lab conditions under the right circumstances at least with a kind of yeast if I'm remembering correctly.
Got my drink and lunch ready for this one. 😊
We've discovered thousands of planets and not a single one is even remotely earth like. I don't think it's much of a paradox.
Always excellent.
Related to this subject I wonder if what one might call 'unreasonable novelties' are great filters? ie: innovations which life had no reason to 'explore' prior having them. eg: Bilaterians - the phase-space of opportunities such a body plan presents does not exist to a 'pre-bilaterian', so 'selective pressure' will not drive the 'invention' of that body plan. It must be reached by accident - most likely exaptation...
...maybe life itself is just such an 'unreasonable novelty'? Really not that hard to do in the grand scheme of things, hence the reason why it seems to have started so quickly here on Earth. But non-the-less the opportunities 'life' provides are by definition not within the phase-space of opportunities inanimate matter has available - it has to be stumbled upon by accident (or divine intervention) to get going. In other words there is no inevitability to any such 'unreasonable novelty'.
By contrasting example developing photosynthesis would not be an 'unreasonable novelty'. If I am a bacterium in possession of even remotely relevant synthetic pathways bathed in the energy source known as sunlight developing the ability to make use of that energy source is pretty much inevitable, even if getting there is very hard.
One wonders what phase-space of opportunities us bilaterians are missing out on because they do not exist to creatures such as ourselves? What 'unreasonable novelty' must we accidentally gain to be able to find out?
What if alien life are all still in their dinosaur age?
That would still be cool.
That's a sort of solution; in the sense that time limits our ability to observe potential alien life every bit as much as distance does. There could be a civilization that colonized a hundred star systems but if they finished doing so 1,000 years ago and they are10,000 light years away we would see no indication of it.
That would be rare intelligence, whuch is a different video.
@@christineshotton824I guess that humanoids will do the interstellar travel and no messages back on discoveries for thousands of years.
Given the likely number of habitable planets in the galaxy, that is basically the same scenario as complex life being very rare, and Earth is the outlier where complex life arose and evolved millions of years earlier than is typical.
@@adamwu4565
True, but not all planets out there are 4.6myo.
Some are much older.
If the impact 66mya didn’t happen we probably wouldn’t be here but dinosaurs would. Fun to think about.
Excellent show
Isaac - the Rs are amazing! Congratulations man!!
Another Excellent Presentation!
Thanks for another awesome upload 👌 👏 🎉
Isaac; your channel is a breath of fresh air in an internet full of nonsense.
Good subject time to grab snacks.
Thanks dude. Have a great week too🎉🎉
Nice presentation, soundlevel is a little bit too much.
deeply excited as a cell-bio nerd. There is another theory proposed by physicist Jeremy Englund stating that the earliest life is thermodynamically favored as a way to Distribute a persistent energy source, Like a sun for instance. Could be worth a video.
Thank you Isaac!
To keep up my proud tradition of commenting before I actually watch the video. I imagine theres more than just one condition required for intelligent life to develop. I would assume that the conditions for life to form are no longer present on Earth, else we'd observe the first life forming all the time. But those conditions weren't appropriate for more advanced life. So it could be that intelligent life requires not just Earthlike conditions, but specifically "early Earthlike conditions, then Earthlike conditions from X million years ago, then Earthlike conditions from a hundred thousand years ago" and for each new link in that chain the odds of any given planet meeting the conditions drops dramatically.
So there's the creatures with mitochondria, but what if that complexity wrinkle looked a bit different where all cells come in symbiotic macro colonies
Hello!
For The Algorithm!
More fermi video there's my favorite that and uplifting.
I've felt like this is one of the main factors. Then combine that with the fact we are limited to how fast we can travel thru out our universe. The combination of all these factors in both of these categories could really limit the possibility that even if life meets all these values, they could end up being too far away from each other and just don't have the ability to physically reach each other..
Given that we so recently confirmed exoplanets even exist, our ability to actually see the universe clearly is the most likely solution to the paradox, IMHO.
When taking about life, sure. But the Fermi paradox is about intelligent life, and we should detect the kind of advanced technology we can dream up.
I expect that the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that there is no paradox. I just don't think the Universe is old enough for interstellar civilization to exist, yet. I expect in a million years, our current age will be known for Type I civilizations popping up all over the Universe.
I’m rooting for Panspermia as to how life got going so quickly. Kurzgesagt did a very interesting video on the topic. Not saying it’s true, just my favorite horse in the race.
Love that Lombus song at the start. From his Space Engine collection.
Does non complex life preclude intelligence? I imagine a planet of strange machines filled with colonies of writhing worms. Each worm colony is an intelligent self preserving intelligent entity, but their intelligence operates on a temporal domain about 5x slower than humans. From simple worms, no more complex, than large planarians comes intelligence that could rival our own.
In this context, worms are complex. As are amoeba. And there is some debate if by complexity we are including or excluding modern bacteria.
Yeah, if I had to guess, I would say this is probably a pretty strong filter.
Looking at the history of life, one cannot help thinking the first steps towards complexity took a lot longer time. So maybe something astronomically unlikely hade to happen for the snowball to get rolling.
Way to open with a pun. I'm grabbing a drink and a snack for this one.
Fave vid you have made, so far.
Cos it's filled with legit stats.
😁🌏☮️
🤔 Excellent video today.
The state of the fingernails in that coin flip stock footage is stomach turning 😂
Nice
This is my personal favorite explanation for why we have not seen any other technology signatures. I always life and evolution like a pyramid. Bacteria is the base and we are the peak.
I'm not nearly smart enough to follow Mr. Arthur's talks, but I like to anyway. It's like having a friend in the room, who is even smarter than I am.
I just watched another video about the same thing but he was talking about how important viruses have been in our evolution. Also the Myelin sheath around nerves and how important that stuff is for fast nerve impulses at. Was very interesting. Intelligence life "like" us might be extremely, bloody rare! I hope it's that and not the dark Forrest theory 😉🤯
Honestly, when it comes to Abiogenesis, I'm more willing to believe the "first cellular life" arose on Earth HUNDREDS, if not THOUSANDS, of times before it finally took root. This isn't merely to say that life is a difficult thing to accomplish: Perhaps it is, perhaps not. This is merely an acknowledgement that singular celled life usually has a VERY short expiration date, and there's no way to know that you got the right "formulae" as it were for the self-replicating chemical compounds that would eventually become RNA and DNA until it gets stress tested. Just like in a lab, you're gonna see ALOT more failures than you will see successes, and its going to take a long time to get it right.
... and just at the last possible second, I realize I'm accidentally inviting the intelligent design theorists into discussion lol. The price I pay for making youtube comments I suppose.
The argument that the passage from unicellularity to multicelularity not being a one in trillon random event because it happened multiple times is not a good argument to me, because it could literally be that if the condition on earth are perfect enough to happen one time it could literally happen 8 billion times.
I think life or rather universe does start from most simple things than slowly become more complex. Life is an example of more complex being of things that just exist and also humans who are trying to be more unique. For now we cant compare ourselves with other life that could be existed on other planets but one day humanity will become complex enough that no one can understand our origin.
Transitioning from single-cell to multi-cell life may not be as complicated as you think. It may even be ordinary. but the complexity of the organism is debatable. I read that very interesting results were obtained in experiments on yeast cells. They came together to form a complex lump, but I think they were all composed of a single type of cells, with a diameter of 1 cm. I remember that there was a structure like a primitive circulatory system. Cells that self-destruct to create holes to carry nutrients etc. into the structure were mentioned. just like the cells that self-destruct to form fingers in babies. I read it in an article 2-3 years ago.
A multi-species biofilm is a long step to an organism.
I think the key is having a planet with a huge biosphere with a lot of competition. Take the boring billion f.e. Conditions on the planet were extremely stable and the life that was there was much of the same single celled organisms just doing their thing. Snowball earth and several other climatic cataclysms forced life to evolve and diversify. I think there are a lot of planets that got stuck in that boring billion for far too long and that a lot of life started, but died of before it had the chance to evolve. Let's also not forget that the first life on our planet is responsible for there not be a runaway greenhouse-effect with the great oxygenation event. Well, that and trees evolving to use lignine before there were organisms that could digest it. Capturing carbon and holding on to it while going underground. If you keep these variables and a plethora of others in mind then it becomes very obvious that complex life at our level is astronomically rare.
Crazy that Earth just had life out there living its life for billions of years with no humans around to understand how crazy existence actually is.
16:10 "...and the sun dies late tomorrow night." Why did this make me incredibly sad? 😢
this seems most likely to me. complexity would follow an inverse frequency distribution, not all-or-nothing
i got done with the star carrier books a few months ago, and a phrase used in those books was "technic intelligence". and it gave me a phrase to put to a wide gulf i have seen in humans from decades ago when i was stuck working retail, to today, working in production/manufacturing. the fact that the ability to imagine objects could be used as tools, or to operate basic mechanisms even after demonstration, is very far from universal and doesnt seem linked to general indicators of intelligence. a counterpoint being the starfish from echopraxia, who build advanced tech, but arent really sentient.
have you ever covered the role this could play in the fermi paradox?
that intelligent species may arise, but the development and use of complex tools doesnt occur, or is lost due to societies selecting for social manipulation over tool manipulation.
Algorithm note. I love the Fermi Paradox videos.
Could you do an episode of Netflix's 3 Body Problem and how the show explores Clark Tech?
Human complexity is extremely rare.
We know that. The question is 'how rare'?
Eucariotes being formed is the best candidate for great filter.
On Earth, complex life (animal ecosystems) had to wait until the ocean floors were oxygenated, which didn't happen until about 700 - 600 million years ago. There was about 2 billion years of waiting for oxygenic photosynthesis to take off, and then more than another billion years of waiting for plate tectonics to get started and ocean circulation from the poles to the equator to become established. Then we saw the first marine animal ecosystems appear, and they really took off when the deep oceans became fully oxygenated in the Cambrian.
So for most of the Earth's history, life was changing the chemical and geological conditions of the planet, and that took a long time. On a super-Earth, the waiting time for deep oxygenation might be even longer than on Earth. Note that this isn't a "filter" so much as a long, slow bio-geological process.
As for the early emergence of life on Earth, experiments in recent years have been showing that RNA is easy to make on a wet, rocky planet. Give RNA a few hundred million years to evolve and DNA life doesn't seem impossible.
"Go back to being blobs in the ocean, blobs were EASY!"
I have a question different to this video. What if we build a spaceship on a large aesteroid which has its own gravity. Will it help solve gravity problem for space voyages?
Oxygen wasn't absorbed by rocks but by the oceans which contained massive amounts of iron. The banded formations you show are seafloor sedimentary deposits. It seems elementary to me that complex life would be rarer than simple life since its evolutionary pathway is so much more complicated.
One has to wonder if phagocytosis happened as a result of one cell developing a defense that turned out to be symbiotic when the cell was devoured.
Complexity does seem kind of likely, given there is a good argument once you get the ball rolling the process reaches a point of momentum that requires an external limiting factor to intervene.
6:55 the history of Earth in a day
The fact that all of life can trace it's DNA origins to an original organism - Luca , I believe is a big hint that this was a bottle neck and thus extremely susceptible to elimination - thus a strong candidate to the early Fermi paradox. Multicellar Luca ancestor might had a rough start continually dying out and restarting again.
Either that or we are among the first civs to reach this level.
Still no way to coment on Nebula though... 😊
Complex organism emerged two times on Earth in Francevillian biota, Gabon 2.1 Ga and later. The rise of oxygen on Earth produced two times multicellularity. Only that fact show that the presence of oxygen is probably conducive to complex life. Simple life did produce that oxygen so in all probabilities if unicellular life is present it will eventually produce complex multicellular life.
It seems to me that the chances of each new stage of development depends on the population development of the previous stage, as the population of the previous stage became very large, the chances for a breakthrough became much better, just as we are seeing AI develop, possibly soon to become a higher form. Each step has required a lot of participants from the lower rung to exist, increasing the chances of a move to a higher level.
I think multicellular life and not just intelligent life but civilization producing life are both incredibly rare.
It took a relatively short time for life to emerge, but billions of years for multicellular life to emerge. Considering that most scientists put roughly 500 million years into the future as 'curtains' for multicellular life, it's a startling thing to realize that had the evolution of multicellular life on Earth taken just 30% or so longer than it did, it might have never arisen in the first place!
Ditto on intelligence. Earth blew through half of it's multicellular window for an intelligent species to arise. It's not easy for this to happen. Several things must be exactly right! For example, you have the octopi which are terrifically intelligent but as solitary prey animals who live just 1-2 years they could never amount to much. Rats are in a similar situation. Dolphins could never develop complex tool use in their environment even if they possessed human-like intelligence.
This brings me to my next point. Even if an intelligent species arose, it is not entirely inevitable that it would produce a powerful civilization. Imagine if you did have an species arise with human-like intelligence, but it was a solitary one, where the only contact with another member of the species was during a short mating season and the brief time the mother raised her kids. Ultimately, the life of this species would be of little difference from any other animal. The human instinct to collaborate and scale their (our) efforts was arguably more important for the development of civilization than even intelligence itself.
So we humans had all the factors working for us: intelligence, the durability and adaptability to hunt enough food to maintain this intelligence, sociability, the ability to fashion tools with out hands, being a combination of strong and smart sufficient to defeat all out predators and, last, but not least, the luck to avoid a cataclysm that would wipe us off the face of the Earth when our population measured in thousands.
The definition of complex life needs polishing. I can imagine fungi colonies evolved to extreme complexity. Able to stretch miles long, computing capability, spore clouds to cause rain....
A man looked up to the universe and cried; 'Be🎉hold. i exist and think and see!'. 'So what?' the universe replied; 'That creates no sense of indebtedness in me'.
What is the consensus on how long star formation will last?
While there is still hydrogen and gravity.
With the "Goldilocks" stricture, not all planets orbit there. How many stars have this feature?
Something occured to me when he started talking about dna alternatives and their effect on mutations. What if a simpler but more robust molecule tends to out compete more dynamic but fragile types of "dna"? A genetic blockade of sorts, and we just lucked out by not loosing our delicate capacity for evolution at the outset of life.
Was there ever RNA only cells?
What if the mitochondria were originally free cells that invaded other cells. We know that pandemics get milder with generations so as not to kill the host. This could happen at a cellular level with mitochondria eventually losing the ability to infect new cells and being forced to occupy one cell, until that cell divides normally.
It will be a Paradox until we find the first ones, Then it'll be a Pandora's Box.
Well, considering seti did find signals from 18 other planets, im pretty sure there is a lot of life out there.
Drink. ☕️
Snack. 🍮
Science. 😄
Lex and Sam Altman brought me here
If you put a bunch of electronic components and a battery in a box. Then if you shake it long enough, what are the odds that one day it will make a radio?