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| I saved this Noema article a while back, but I can't remember why, only that I found it interesting (even though it's not even two months old now). Which doesn't mean that I agree with all of it. What Searching For Aliens Reveals About Ourselves  Looking for life beyond Earth changes the way we perceive life right here at home. You know how, on old maps, you often see art in the unexplored places, usually things like sea monsters or fire-breathing dragons? That's what our various conceptions of alien life reminds me of. We don't know, so we make shit up. This is okay; it's part of what makes us us. Without this kind of imagination, fiction writing would be a lot more boring. The trick is, we need to sometimes step back and separate imagination from reality. I'm as big a fan of Star Trek as anyone, and more than most, but aliens aren't going to be humans with forehead makeup or rubber suits. Hell, I expect the vast majority of them won't even be what we call sentient, just like the vast majority of life on Earth isn't. As an astrobiologist, I am often teased about my profession. Hey, at least you don't get "Oh, you must be a virgin wearing a pocket protector and horn-rimmed glasses, and can't write good." Which is what we engineers have to put up with. I'll have you know that I don't wear glasses at all. The moment we realized our entire biosphere existed on the skin of a rocky planet hurtling through the void around a very ordinary star — one of some 100 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of perhaps 2 trillion galaxies in the universe — we discovered life in space. This argument is like when I talk about "artificial" vs. "natural." It's a point of view. Kind of like how today's southward equinox can be described as "the Sun crosses the equator" or "the Earth's orbit and axial tilt moves the equatorial plane to intersect with the Sun." Both are true, depending on your vantage point. Everything on, in, or gravitationally attached to Earth is, ultimately, from space, but it can still be useful to categorize "terrestrial" as opposed to "extraterrestrial." Astrobiology seeks to uncover generalizations about life: how it comes about, where to find it, and what it is in the first place. Because we are part of the set of all living things in space, astrobiological progress reflexively reveals new truths about us. Even if we never find other life out there, the search itself shapes how we understand our own stories right here on Earth. How people describe, define, and defend their own professions is also interesting. Astrobiologists, however, are most interested in the at least two dozen worlds that we know of, so far, that are just the right size and distance from their host stars to potentially support life as we know it. Which makes perfect sense; you hone in on what's most likely to have what you're looking for. If you're in a strange-to-you city and want a beer, you go to a taproom, not an art museum, even though you might find beer in an art museum. Could life "not as we know it" exist elsewhere? Sure. But they're playing the odds. What we need to watch out for, as ordinary people reading stuff like this, is making the unsubstantiated jump from reports of "this planet could potentially support life" to "they've found an alien civilization!" The latter is the drawing of sea monsters in unexplored corners of the map. The article goes into some of the tools (mostly telescopes and computers) they use, then: While many of our simulations will be mere fictions, what makes them scientific is that these thought experiments are constrained by the known laws of physics, chemistry and biology. In the end, we produce scores of imaginary worlds that give us clues about what we need to look for to find another Earth-like planet using future observatories like HWO. Look, all the simulations are fictions. If they weren't, they wouldn't be simulations. It's like making computer models of next week's weather forecast: you might get close, and it's better than not making the prediction, but you won't be spot on. And as we know, the "known laws" are subject to tweaks. Especially in biology. People keep finding biology here on Earth that doesn't follow the Rules. Again, though, you have to start with what's known. Although many exoplanet scientists describe their work as a search for “Earth 2.0,” I find this phrase extremely misleading. “Earth 2.0” conjures images of a literal copy of the Earth. But we’re not looking for an escape hatch after we’ve trashed version 1.0. Yeah, I'm pretty sure some people are. Else there wouldn't be so much fiction about it. The article continues with some stuff I've discussed in here (and in the previous blog) numerous times, so I'm going to skip it this time—except to say that it seems like the author falls into the common fallacy of thinking that evolution (which is arguably a prerequisite for considering something "life") must necessarily produce tool-users who go on to shoot rockets into space and look for evidence of aliens doing similar things. We know it's possible because that describes us. What we don't know, and can't know yet, is how common that is in the universe. In other words, don't expect Vulcans and Klingons. But, as I've also said numerous times, even unequivocal evidence of microbes or their equivalent would be a paradigm shift for us. |
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