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Notes -
Is the Fermi Paradox Debunked?
A new paper is out(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404) concluding that the Drake equation is poorly designed and humans are most likely alone in the universe:
TDLR the Drake equation is wrong by dramatically overrating the probability of other intelligent life. We are more likely to be alone than we thought, and my take on this has been for a while that if life was common we'd have experimentally demonstrated abiogenesis by now. But this in turn debunks the great filter arguments people(mainly liberals) make about all sorts of pet issues- the great filter is already behind us.
I'm inclined to think that intelligent life is extremely common-- multiple species of humans coexisted in the past, and currently I would guess that at least one of [corvids, cetaceans, nonhuman great apes, cephalopods, LLMs in training runs] have members that are meaningfully sapient. However, the conditions for creating technological civilizations may be extremely rare and contingent-- and spacefaring technological civilizations even more so-- since maintaining a technological civilization is essentially a matter of outrunning evolution with new advances, and there's only so much physics/technology to discover. If you stagnate then diseases and other species have a chance to catch up, or individuals gain gene adaptations that benefit them at the cost of the society trying to harness them, or you simply run out of local resources/negentropy. It is essentially a geologic accident that the first wave of complex earth life was wiped out in a way that let the second flourishing eventually discover and make use of the plentiful hydrocarbons they left behind to grow society in exponentially more complex ways so quickly the rest of terrestrial life failed to adapt.
I think eukaryotic life is probably pretty rare in the universe. Happened a single time in evolutionary history and there are no intermediates. Will provide more detail later.
I’ve seen this posited as well - that the primary endosymbiosis that formed eukaryotes, where a free-living bacterial cell got incorporated into a host cell to create mitochondria, expanding the cellular energy budget, is an extremely rare event that might limit the prevalence of advanced life throughout the galaxy.
That hypothesis falls apart a lot though when you consider that this has actually occurred multiple times; e.g. chloroplasts are also the result of endosymbiosis and in fact they have developed independently in Archaeplastida and Paulinella alike, which certainly speaks against the idea of it being a rare occurrence. And then there are the nitrogen fixing organelles in certain types of marine alga, which appear to have been a result of this same process. For primary endosymbiosis to have happened at least four times indicates the mechanism itself is not rare, and significantly weakens its ability to explain the Fermi paradox.
Yea but all of those symbioses happened after the initial mitochondrial endosymbiosis, which drove adaptions that made those subsequent acquisitions much easier. I think there’s something special about that first endosymbiosis that makes it especially difficult.
I just looked through my sheaf of saved papers to evaluate this and interestingly enough there are further examples of symbioses occurring without the initial mitochondrial endosymbiosis (albeit not well publicised ones) - for example mealybugs possess specialised cells containing endosymbiotic β-proteobacteria which themselves contain endosymbiotic γ-proteobacteria, essentially forming a set of nested obligate endosymbionts. The authors note this probably occurred multiple times, with different precursors of the ancestral γ-proteobacteria independently infecting the ancestral β-proteobacteria on approximately four occasions.
There's also the fact that it's hard to gauge how likely endosymbiosis would have been on early Earth; mitochondrial development likely hindered the development of further endosymbiosis along those lines to some degree because the already established eukaryotic lineage filled available niches.
Huh cool, I didn't know about this serial endosymbiosis!
I will say that even in that case the mitochondrial origin event is still a little different, as it was the fusion of two very different clades of life (Asgard archae and alpha-proteobacter).
In Lane's book (The vital question) there was also some evidence for a proto eukaryote found via deep sea trawling. So you may be right.
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