• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Finding Life On Mars Could Be The “Worst News Ever” For Humanity

January 28, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

You may have heard of the Fermi Paradox, but if you haven’t, here it is in a nutshell: Given the high probability that alien life exists out there in the universe, why has nobody got in touch? 

If there are so many other civilizations out there, possibly at far more advanced stages than we are because of how long the universe has dragged on for (no offense universe, but get to the point), why are they not doing what we’re doing, sending out probes and desperately searching for other signs of life? 

Advertisement



One idea is the Great Filter. The hypothesis goes that before alien civilizations can make it to the point where they are able to leave their solar system and begin colonizing their galaxy, something happens to prevent them from doing so, or we’d see evidence for this in our own Milky Way. Whether this is the step from multi-cell life to animals that can use tools, or from where we are now to exploring the galaxy, we just don’t know.

What makes this so interesting is we wouldn’t know if we are past the “great filter” or whether it’s going to happen in our future. Could it be that most don’t make it past single-cell life and we have made it past this filter? Or at some point yet to come are we, like other alien civilizations out there, about to destroy ourselves before we are able to leave Earth, perhaps through war or using up our resources before we can escape?

Somewhat disconcertingly, some philosophers and scientists have suggested that this means if we were to find life on, say, Mars it would have some less-than-ideal implications for where we are in relation to the Great Filter. Oxford University philosophy professor Nick Bostrom says that he hopes the search for extraterrestrial life turns up nothing. If we found very simple life forms, Bostrom argued in an article published in the MIT Technology Review in 2008, then we could conclude that the filter happens sometime after that point of life. If we found multi-cellular life, this would narrow down the point at which the Great Filter could take place.

Bostrom believes that in order to narrow down where the filter takes place, we should look at life on Earth to see which steps are improbable. “One criterion is that the transition should have occurred only once,” he wrote. “Flight, sight, photosynthesis, and limbs have all evolved several times here on Earth, and are thus ruled out.”

Advertisement

He also argued that evolutionary features that took a long time to occur even after prerequisites were met would indicate that this evolutionary step was improbable, eg the original emergence of life. The step from animals to humans took place over a relatively short time period, geologically speaking, suggesting it’s a weak candidate for a Great Filter event.

If we were to find evidence of vertebrates on Mars (very unlikely, but we can dream!) he believed that would be terrible news, as it would suggest that the bulk of the Great Filter is still in our future, and we’ll have to face the probability that we will go extinct before we are technologically mature enough to travel through the galaxy.

“Such a discovery would be a crushing blow. It would be by far the worst news ever printed on a newspaper cover,” Bostrom wrote. “This is why I’m hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look. It would keep alive the hope for a great future for humanity.”



So, though there are many other possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox that are worth looking at if you enjoy that sort of thing, if Bostrom is correct it means that finding evidence of advanced civilizations is good news, but finding the wrong stages of life that evolved independently in our own Solar System would be the worst possible news we could receive.

Advertisement

An earlier version of this article was first published in November 2020.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Soccer – FIFA backs down on threat to fine Premier clubs who play South American players
  2. U.S. House passes abortion rights bill, outlook poor in Senate
  3. Two children killed in missile strikes on Yemen’s Marib – state news agency
  4. We’ve Breached Six Of The Nine “Planetary Boundaries” For Sustaining Human Civilization

Source Link: Finding Life On Mars Could Be The "Worst News Ever" For Humanity

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • How Do We Predict The Weather? Find Out More In Issue 40 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • You Should Never Leave These Foods In Your Fridge Door (But We Bet You Do)
  • These Gullies On Mars Look Carved – We Might Finally Know What Created Them
  • Potential Environmental Trigger For Autism Identified, 3I/ATLAS’s Tail Appears To Have Changed Direction, And Much More This Week
  • Spaghetti Has Inner Secrets We’re Only Just Learning About
  • How Far Back In Time Could You Go And Still Understand English?
  • We Now Know How The First People Reached America – And It Wasn’t On Foot
  • Two Major Coral Species Now Functionally Extinct In Florida Keys, After Record-Breaking Marine Heatwave
  • A “Super-Earth” In The Habitable Zone Is Half The Distance To Comparable Worlds
  • Adorable But Critically Endangered Bornean Orangutan Born In Conservation Success
  • How Did The FDA Settle On The “2,000 Calories Per Day” Guideline?
  • Comet 3I/ATLAS Losing At Least Two Kangaroos’ Worth Of Dust Every Second
  • Mummified Dinosaur Duo Prove They Had Hooves, Marking “The First Confirmed Hooved Reptile”
  • What Do The Numbers On Your Toaster Really Mean?
  • NASA Vs. Elon Musk: Is A Moon Landing This Decade Off The Cards?
  • Scientists Explored Some Of The Deepest Parts Of The Ocean And Spotted Some Seriously Weird Deep-Sea Creatures
  • 500-Meter-Tall Megatsunami Struck Remote Alaskan Fjord After Massive Landslide
  • 3I/ATLAS, CKM Syndrome, And Mosquitoes’ Final Frontier
  • Male Humpback Dolphins Spotted Wearing Sea Sponge “Wigs” To Woo The Ladies
  • Can’t Sleep? The Military Sleep Trick That Helps You Fall Asleep in Just 2 Minutes
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version