Terrarium

The problem here is that we don't know you dropped your phone. Instead of a phone it might be a pool of jelly or an entire asteroid or a lichen thing that eats methane and only lives on the absolute best, truly primo rocks. So when you illuminate it you go, "aww man it's just a rock!" and move on. And you already know other life isn't going to be a phone, that's something for humans in particular. You need to look for the rock dwellers, they are more likely than the phone-havers.

One also has to make peace with the fact that we may not know if there is life in other solar systems for a very, very long time. It probably requires making an actual visit and sending back results. And that would likely take hundreds of thousands of years in our small neighborhood of systems. We can imagine getting really good telescopes before that, I suppose, but they would probably have limits. As in, with what resolution could we make observations via a constellation of telescopes distributed around the solar system? So we can get much better spatial resolution to ask the most important question: is there metabolism?

I think it's a somewhat useful thought experiment for asking why we don't observe EM signals like our own (albeit incomplete re: detectability of far off signals). But it is very anthropocentric so it also serves as a useful object of criticism, as even the questions it asks are probably wrong.

Even then, evolution is historically contingent. If you rewound and replayed the tape of life on earth and changed a few early conditions, you'd end up with a very different story. Evolutionary biology teaches us that life on other planets should be different from us more than similar. This also applies at the biochemical level.

It's understandable that people take your logic and run with it, but it rapidly clashes with evolution. In addition, we don't actually know what conditions are necessary for abiogenesis (probably not just one kind). Even on our own planet! We know there wasn't much atmospheric oxygen at the time. And possibly not that much water. Yet exobiologists look for oceanic planets with atmospheric oxygen because that's what we have. Sure, oxygen is a good electron receptor and can be produced from water (in our case, chlorophyllic photosynthesis), but there is mo reason to think photosynthesis would evolve the same way independently. Exactly the opposite, actually. It should be different. No reason to think there would even be proteins. The chemistry would be very different. And it took over a billion years for chlorophyllic photosynthesis to evolve on earth!

Yes but it's actually the opposite of what to look for, understanding evolution. Evolution is historically contingent - it only builds on what it already has. Life on earth has billions of years of a semi-random walk on which life was built. If you replayed it under slightly different conditions you would expect to see something quite different.

For example, we depict aliens as humanoid in fiction, mostly so we can tell storoes. The more imaginative writers might make them look reptilian or something. But there's no reason to think they would even have bilateral symmetry. Or have cells. Or live on the same spatial or temporal scale. The same applies to biochemistry.

It's understandable that people would want to look for the familiar to look for life, but our own knowledge of how life on earth operates tells us that we need to look for something fairly unfamiliar.

It's mostly about mustaches

What are you, some kind of commie?

Except they are already vibes based so there is no reason to think the initial approximation is accurate. They could all be massive overestimates. There is no reason they need to regress to the mean.

They used telescopes to infer that this planet has a specific molecule on it that is known to be made by life on earth and not en masse by any other process.

IMO this is a stretch because life on another planet probably has somewhat different chemistry. There is a massive unfounded bias in all pop exobiology that finding other life means finding stuff just like life on earth.

Which is not to say it isn't neat but it is literally another planet light years away. We know almost nothing about it.

When I see a Ford F-150, I shake my head and think, "loser".

"The workers" will not wake up on their own, ever. Concerted organizing is always required and even the successful movements never arrive fully formed. Expect overt violence and heightened contradictions. More fertile ground for organizing coupled with repression and 20 new kinds of Pinkertons. Trying to organize younger workers that won't recognize the dangers of organizing with their phones and spying cloud services until their friends start dying. There is no guarantee that "the workers" will succeed on any first round. The path may involve a fascisy takeovet, bourgeous revolution, and only then a socialist surge. The intermediary period could look like the status quo but with a higher prison population, lower pay, higher rent, worse education, and increased reactionary sentiment.

We do still need to organize, to build the best possible path. And hey, there might be a soft balkanization where we can organize more safely in certain states.

Hell yeah.

PS lizard milk is basically a watered down virgin pina colada.

I don't really know that much about it, sorry. I just know sudden chronic headache is common with concussions and that docs can help with it. I'm glad you're seeing one!

I guess the other thing I know is that you should be extra careful about not getting any more, though it's not like most people set out to get a concussion.