Talk:Life origination beyond planets

Keep and improve

I would advise against erasing this topic purely on the grounds that it might currently come across as "dubious."

Other notions considered dubious not so very long ago include tectonic plates, powered flight and space travel, not to mention living creatures thriving at temperatures in excess of 212F. Granted, those particular extremophiles are, as carbon-based lifeforms, our distant relations, but let's not limit ourselves with carbon chauvinism.

Speculation is the energy source for scientific progress. Can living creatures evolve on or inside stellar furnaces? Probably not, but be in no hurry to declare it impossible. Even if such creatures do not exist today, let's give the universe a chance: it's only been at this business of random interaction for a dozen billion years. Who knows what it might come up with over the next hundred billion?

For that matter, proportion is another temptation to chauvinism. Stars are balls of material just a few orders of magnitude larger than planets. What about much more profound size differences? When was the last time you paid attention to a specific atom in your left big toe? Now move your perspective down to that diminutive size and look up: the entirety of "you the individual human" would appear from that point of view comparable to a hundred billion galaxies and all the empty void between them. Which begs the question, "Whose big toe is our entire solar system a vanishingly tiny part of?"

The proportion of Time is another contributor to why we have yet to achieve SETI's goal of confirming that we are not alone. We the biosphere of Earth have been alive for about four billion years, yet we've been generating radio waves for only the last forty-millionth of that time. And in just that blink of a cosmic eye we've already progressed from simple Morse Code to a torrent of digital traffic which would sound like background static to any observer unacquainted with our encoding methods.

And all of this assumes that our experience of the Passage of Time is somehow special. We've just recently begun to accept the thought that trees communicate, a notion which only stopped being dubious when we stopped expecting communication to happen at human rates of speed. With lifespans of thousands of years, trees take a long time to say anything, and they rarely say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say. Now imagine a lifeform consisting of interstellar dust, or stellar plasma, or some other profoundly un-Earth-like material: might such life communicate at a pace a thousand times slower than we communicate? Or a thousand times faster? And would we recognize such as communication unless we first embraced the possibility of such a different pace?

In a universe whose extents of both space and time approach infinity, there's room for infinite diversity in infinite combinations. By no means is every sci-fi speculation later borne out by scientific confirmation, but sci-fi speculation does provide science with 'til-then unconsidered avenues for investigation. The details Jules Verne envisioned for reaching the moon certainly did not prove viable, yet we eventually got there anyway, in part due to Verne having cast a moon landing as a practicable engineering goal rather than a wishful thinking miracle. 24.88.167.9 (talk) 04:39, 13 October 2024 (UTC)