Yes, it seems pretty untenable that rare earth is the explanation for the lack of evidence of any life outside of Earth. But even if it is true that we’re the only life in the observable universe, the universe is still much bigger, and in many physicists opinion, probably infinite.

The fact that life seems to have evolved on Earth as soon as it was possible to is some evidence that abiogenesis is not the bottleneck. But the usefulness of this observation depends on the distribution of other things we don’t know. For example, if on planets where life evolves later, life never makes it to human-level intelligence before the planet becomes uninhabitable, then our early abiogenesis is survivorship bias, rather than something we should expect to be in the center of the distribution of when abiogenesis happens on a planet where it is possible.

What?.. no. That would be confirmed life on another planet. It would be the single biggest discovery in human history. You would have heard if that was the case. “Fossilized microbes” would be “life”. Nobody needs the life to still be alive to be a huge, huge deal.

If you’re thinking the word “organic” means “microbe”, it doesn’t. I guess this is the consequence of all the harm to the public understanding that all the shitty headlines caused trying to get clicks but still being “technically correct” despite knowing it will be misinterpreted as “life”.

Not 100% proof. That would require the universe to be infinite, which it still might not be if the curvature is within the tiny margin of error. It’s close enough to proof that it might as well be the case. The entire universe couldn’t be less than something like 130x the size of the observable universe, though… unless it has nontrivial topology. There’s always a caveat.

No they don’t. And you genuinely do not understand the gulf that evidence would have to overcome for aliens to be more likely than literally any other explanation for any phenomena you’re talking about. Including explanations that require extremely unlikely coincidences. Because coincidences happen. But if aliens have visited Earth, that requires an unbelievable amount of observations about the universe to be explained. And truly, the evidence to overcome that would be MORE than a good video. And we don’t even fucking have that. It’s pathetic how people act about UFOs and aliens.

The fact that it’s always bad evidence, or indirect evidence, should tell you that it’s always the same bullshit. If you believe it, it’s because you want to, not because there’s the tiniest reason to.

The Book of Why by Judea Perl

Aliens very obviously exist. Life evolved on Earth. The idea that it has never done that elsewhere is ridiculous. The question is how spread out they are in both time and space. The fact that we see no clear evidence of them points to “very spread out”. But it could just be complex life, or intelligent life that is rare, which is why we look for much fainter signals that we’d only see when specifically looking, like with JWST. Either way, they exist. Whether that existence has any relevance to yours is up for debate.

But they have definitely never visited Earth.

The entire world is filled with so much information absolutely everywhere. Everything is constantly leaking it out, blasting it in every direction. One of the most worrying potential capabilities that could rapidly emerge in AI is collecting and finding patterns in this information.

Look at examples of side-channel attacks for computers, and then realize that AI has the potential to have side-channel attacks for… everything. It’s pretty scary how much you can narrow down guesses when you have a few pieces of information. Using WiFi to learn about a physical space is just the surface.