I hate the website. Why? Because when I scroll
down, I get blocked, that is, I can not easily copy/paste
via a selection anymore; the selection simply does not
work, and is connected to the slow-fade out and pop-in
of an irrelevant widget I can not want to be bothered to
even look at.
Any author who uses such a website strategy gets insta-perma-banned by me.
It is not worth my time "reading" anything that is made useless
by really horrible UI choices, be it infinite scrolling or
fafe-out-scrolling-click-to-continue. No, I do not want to
click on anything to continue. I don't even want to see
accept-cookies. Whenever such a question comes up I'd auto-say
no, no pester-widget. Thankfully for the latter there are
extensions available, but I have not found a strategy against
the slow-fade-in-pester-strategy.
Why can I not easily select the text I wish to copy/paste here, from
that horrible website? I have no clue, but I can not
invest time to investigate this. Hopefully more and
more people realise that any strategy to pester people
means you devalue YOUR OWN CONTENT as-is. The same
applies to medium.com too - it is one reason I do not
read anything from there anymore. People need to
stop putting up barriers if they want people to read
anything.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Yes indeed, I've thought panspermia in the Sun's natal cluster is an interesting idea. What could make it even more interesting is that small bodies in our Solar System (and likely its sister systems) were warm enough for liquid water to exist for some millions of years then, so there would be an enormous volume of material in which Origin of Life might have occurred (and, if it did, to then spread after the parent body froze and then fragmented.)
It would make a fine science fictional scenario that could get around the Fermi problem: those 10,000 or so systems could have life, but the rest of the universe not have life.
>those 10,000 or so systems could have life, but the rest of the universe not have life.
That's also a neat scenario to contemplate.
I was thinking a bit bigger: if panspermia gets dramatically more viable, then nebula could switch over in the probability distribution from "default sterile" to default teeming...
"Default teaming" really isn't viable due to the Fermi problem.
But if OoL is extremely unlikely, the cluster panspermia idea still allows extraterrestrial life to reasonably exist and be reachable, because that life didn't require a separate highly unlikely OoL event.
I think SETI should focus on stars that look like the Sun's siblings.
"Teaming" (social) organisms are also fun, sure. ;)
The Fermi paradox assumes we'd be good at observing aliens, and that aliens will leave evidence that's conspicuous to us. These two statements are roughly equivalent, basically saying there can't be too much "impedance mismatch" between the two.
But again, even besides that, the nebula can still "teem" even though we never see any here on Earth, because the Sun vs nebula math is just so different for interstellar travel too. Many civilizations, seeded from common dirty chemistry, then separated by vast distance as the star migrates out of the nebula.
TL;DR nebula parameter differences solve Fermi even in a teeming universe, but I doubt we'd see the aliens even if they were here. ;)
This has occurred to people! But if you run the numbers, they are still not good enough in that early (~100 My) window when stars in the parent nebula are close together, you get something like 1 chance in 1000 of possible panspermia events (based on modeling lumps of rock flying back and forth). Not terrible odds, but nothing like the Mars -> Earth odds.
Anyone have the citation? I knew I couldn't be the first to think of it, but I was more commenting on the complete lack of discussion within the peer-reviewed literature.
A more extreme version of this is the idea of panspermia in the early universe, when the cosmic microwave background radiation was warm enough to keep water liquid: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/habitable.pdf
Forgive my ignorance here, but at such an early period in the solar system, wouldn't there have been few if any rocks with sufficient gravity for life to form on?
I mean we as humans have a way to approach light speed (with nuclear explosions) today, with our primitive technology. Anything even 500 years more advanced than us can probably travel very long distances.
> But if 2-9-3 really had been isolated from its relative for a quarter billion years, enough random mutations in the rDNA should have accumulated for there to be a difference of at least 50 base pairs
Occams razor definitely points to this just being a sterilization problem. But it would be funny if the bacteria was just way more stable than people expect.
For you, life cannot wait. Please go out and make contacts. Be welcoming to people. Fall in love.
I wonder how my life would have turned out differently. I am a nerd. I am an introvert. I am single. Mostly, I am enjoying it. Sometimes - and increasingly more often - I am questioning it. I have baggage. Was visiting my (younger) sister's grave today. She had baggage with a sad outcome. I am thinking more about my existence.
I wish this world would be a more kind place. And I am praising anyone who is contributing to that. Try to be a contributor.
There's a point when it feels it's over, there's no point. Some people think more about the end rather than the existence and realise there's no point – as in, there's really no point to any of this. This feeling doesn't necessarily mean the person is heading to the sad outcome. I mean that could have been a relief, at least to the person. But the saddest outcome is that there's really no recovery for some people and evolution keeps them going.
My advice is, go dancing. Learn to enjoy your body and how to move it freely for fun, then you will find a likeminded body to enjoy together. But depending where you life, finding a good place to dance with nice people and not just drunk idiots can be a bit harder unfortunately.
Triathlon clubs are another great place to meet people. My club has has 8 weddings this year from people who met training. Turns out chatting over an 80 mile bike ride is a great way to get to know someone.
Time seems to go faster, the older you are. When 5, a day lasts enormously, a month forever away.
When 30, a day is still noticeable. When 50, a day flies past. When 70? A week vanishes so very quickly.
A bitter truth of age, is the older you get, the less time you have left? Well, the faster that time seems to move to you. It's as if the more you try to hold on, the faster it goes away.
There are ways to improve this. New experience is one. Doing the same thing every day, with no challenge or change, just makes life fly by.
You can be an introvert and still experience loads of new and of change. Trust me on this. And as a geeky introvert, you have a mind to learn daily, and more importantly, learn different things, not just tech.
But I guess what I'm saying is, do indeed "live more", but do it as you. Don't let these weirdo extroverts make you dance to their tune.
It seems to me that my mental model of how long I've lived is it's a fixed amount of time. Hence, the longer I live, the more perceived time is compressed.
Besides activity, another advice would be mindset.
As in, are you ready to meet your dream partner today and invite him to your home?
No? Not ready? Place is a mess and you are not really comfortable opening up in the first place right now?
Then this would be something one can work on.
Does not mean your place needs to be always perfect and a date does not have to start by inviting someone in. But are you actually ready for it?
What is it, that you really want?
While I was single for a long time, I was neither clear nor prepared for a partner, yet yearning for one. That did not work. I had some growing up to do first.
You have a point, that the comment isn't actually about the article. And yet, einrealist also has a point that is worth hearing. It's OT, but it's worth hearing.
Please don't take up discussion space for something else like that. You can write about that in plenty of other places where it's germane to the topic at hand.
Your comment is far outside the culture here. If you don't like someone's comment, read something else; click the minus sign (collapse thread) if you like. HN pages are not paper; we're not running out of space, and this thread has only 64 comments.
I think their comment is the most beautiful thing I've seen today; I'm so glad they left it here.
Maybe OP didn’t read the article, but often the title of the article is more interesting to HN than the article itself, which may be the case in this instance given it’s (currently) the top-voted comment.
(As a side note, I wish titles were more fitting to the article, vs. trying to bait clicks with catchy titles that often suggest a different topic.)
What would a better title have been, on a substack that is exclusively about space exploration?
"Hey lonely HN nerds, wipe the tear from your eye and come read about microbe survival times in salt, permafrost, and open space"? Something else? I'm open to suggestions.
Perhaps a good solution in this case would be to add something to the HN title, say (to borrow a suggestion from the author): "How long can life wait? (microbe survival times in salt, permafrost, and open space)".
I'm not thrilled with this kind of clickbait-y title, but when you're subscribed to the blog, you know what it's likely to be about and ignore that, and the problem only appears here when this context is lost.
haa... you really don't need others to justify your life you know... it's annoying how that's always the default, and how often i'm pushed to conform to it.
And here we have the true answer. All the other answers are a form of "stop being an introvert" thus denying your nature. Accept yourself, be at peace with yourself, live the life that gives you inner peace and as much happiness as your nature allows.
Don't listen to the people who try to change you, only accept change if it comes from within although it is possible for this to happen because of how others interact with you and how that makes you feel. Don't change just because someone else says you should be more like them. Then you become their puppet, not your own person.
I'm something of the opposite. Very introverted, moved to a very extroverted American city (which one isn't) in my 20s for work and excitement. I pushed myself - dates, meetups, social stuff. Never cold approaches but now if you'd met me you'd think me an extrovert. I'm not, because people stress and exhaust me, but I hide it.
In my 20s and early 30s whenever I left the city sometimes on the weekends, I'd feel this FOMO like I'm missing something fun.
Something changed as I got older. I think around the pandemic. When I was in the city on a beautiful day, I felt this sad feeling like I should be in nature instead.
I eventually got a place in the country. Now that I'm not single, I couldn't give two craps about going out, meeting people, and I hate crowds and noise. There's no greater pleasure than sitting and listening to water sounds outside, reading and studying.
People are overrated, but you need them sometimes. Don't feel bad about being an introvert.
If you're single and you don't want to be, you kind of have to learn extroversion cargo-cult behavior (being a bit more outgoing, interesting and interested in conversation and people, make first moves socially, etc.). Then you hopefully find a partner that's a bit introverted and you get out of there! I speak entirely subjectively as someone who lived in a city a long time and found it dreadful as an introvert.
The best comment of the day; thank you. For those comments wondering how to do it, the first step is to see, know, and love yourself. Nobody else can know you if you don't; nobody else can love you if you don't. And once you do know and love yourself, you'll find the other people are not threatening - they can't really hurt you; you'll want to know and love them.
And if you think you know yourself, this is silly, it's easy, you don't know even what you're missing. I once thought that. Now I see that nobody really knows themself completely.
I think if we do not first figure out how to cooperate on this planet, the division will only grow. IMO the Expanse is more or less what I would expect if we began colonizing the solar system right now.
We’re going to be able to potentially make “perfect” humans through genetic engineering less than a 100 years from now, we are not stuck with our current state forever is something I never see sci-fi tackle, probably because it would take away most things in a story humans find interesting.
We're absolutely not going to agree on a definition of "perfect human" in the next 100 years. If that level of genetic engineering becomes available anytime soon, which template to use will just become another thing to fight about.
I really hate these articles that come out with these deep philosophical questions and then you open it up and it’s something stupid about microbes in a meteor or whatever. I was expecting a much more relatable read.
To answer the question, you should really not “wait” for anything in life anymore past 30. At some point between 35-45 you will likely cross the halfway point of your life and will begin the journey of being on your way out. Life has a cadence, and it’s not fun to be past that point still “waiting” for things you thought you’d have.
Obviously this advice will hit differently for people past a certain age, I’m mostly talking to people in their 20s. They can be saved, but others it may be too late.
You must actualize the person you want to be as early as you can, so you can maximize your time in life being that person. That’s when you will have “arrived” to your life, and can focus on just living instead of constantly chasing who you want to be. If you don’t, you might never get there, and then in the end if you think too much you’ll realize your life will have been a waste. That is a private hell.
At some point, if you wait too long, there may no longer be enough time or resources to actually live the life destined for you, and then it’s all over. Your chance at life expires: dreams unfinished, like cutting off in the middle of sente
Well that was the ambiguity in the title, but if you follow the blog, it was always about space and microbes. I'm not sure care about microbe aliens, but i do enjoy the read.
Man, I broke a lot of nerds' hearts today. Sorry for rug-pulling you with questions on the nature and origin of life, rather than something deep and philosophical!
An article like this that makes no mention of Tardigrades?
"They are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive severe conditions – such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation – that would quickly kill most other forms of life. They have survived exposure to outer space." [1]
76 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 5.8 ms ] threadAny author who uses such a website strategy gets insta-perma-banned by me.
It is not worth my time "reading" anything that is made useless by really horrible UI choices, be it infinite scrolling or fafe-out-scrolling-click-to-continue. No, I do not want to click on anything to continue. I don't even want to see accept-cookies. Whenever such a question comes up I'd auto-say no, no pester-widget. Thankfully for the latter there are extensions available, but I have not found a strategy against the slow-fade-in-pester-strategy.
Why can I not easily select the text I wish to copy/paste here, from that horrible website? I have no clue, but I can not invest time to investigate this. Hopefully more and more people realise that any strategy to pester people means you devalue YOUR OWN CONTENT as-is. The same applies to medium.com too - it is one reason I do not read anything from there anymore. People need to stop putting up barriers if they want people to read anything.
can we make this into a copypasta? lol
Today the Sun is very far from other stars, but early in star formation (within nebula) the stars are
1. much closer together
2. have a higher rate of material ejection (mass exchange)
3. likely have more more benign radiation environments unless near a star, due to GCR shielding by nebula gas
4. likely have higher equilibrium temperature in 'interstellar space'
It would make a fine science fictional scenario that could get around the Fermi problem: those 10,000 or so systems could have life, but the rest of the universe not have life.
I was thinking a bit bigger: if panspermia gets dramatically more viable, then nebula could switch over in the probability distribution from "default sterile" to default teeming...
But if OoL is extremely unlikely, the cluster panspermia idea still allows extraterrestrial life to reasonably exist and be reachable, because that life didn't require a separate highly unlikely OoL event.
I think SETI should focus on stars that look like the Sun's siblings.
The Fermi paradox assumes we'd be good at observing aliens, and that aliens will leave evidence that's conspicuous to us. These two statements are roughly equivalent, basically saying there can't be too much "impedance mismatch" between the two.
But again, even besides that, the nebula can still "teem" even though we never see any here on Earth, because the Sun vs nebula math is just so different for interstellar travel too. Many civilizations, seeded from common dirty chemistry, then separated by vast distance as the star migrates out of the nebula.
TL;DR nebula parameter differences solve Fermi even in a teeming universe, but I doubt we'd see the aliens even if they were here. ;)
Occams razor definitely points to this just being a sterilization problem. But it would be funny if the bacteria was just way more stable than people expect.
I wonder how my life would have turned out differently. I am a nerd. I am an introvert. I am single. Mostly, I am enjoying it. Sometimes - and increasingly more often - I am questioning it. I have baggage. Was visiting my (younger) sister's grave today. She had baggage with a sad outcome. I am thinking more about my existence.
I wish this world would be a more kind place. And I am praising anyone who is contributing to that. Try to be a contributor.
But not sure how helpful they are.
My advice is, go dancing. Learn to enjoy your body and how to move it freely for fun, then you will find a likeminded body to enjoy together. But depending where you life, finding a good place to dance with nice people and not just drunk idiots can be a bit harder unfortunately.
Time seems to go faster, the older you are. When 5, a day lasts enormously, a month forever away.
When 30, a day is still noticeable. When 50, a day flies past. When 70? A week vanishes so very quickly.
A bitter truth of age, is the older you get, the less time you have left? Well, the faster that time seems to move to you. It's as if the more you try to hold on, the faster it goes away.
There are ways to improve this. New experience is one. Doing the same thing every day, with no challenge or change, just makes life fly by.
You can be an introvert and still experience loads of new and of change. Trust me on this. And as a geeky introvert, you have a mind to learn daily, and more importantly, learn different things, not just tech.
But I guess what I'm saying is, do indeed "live more", but do it as you. Don't let these weirdo extroverts make you dance to their tune.
So, yes, relativity.
As in, are you ready to meet your dream partner today and invite him to your home?
No? Not ready? Place is a mess and you are not really comfortable opening up in the first place right now?
Then this would be something one can work on.
Does not mean your place needs to be always perfect and a date does not have to start by inviting someone in. But are you actually ready for it?
What is it, that you really want?
While I was single for a long time, I was neither clear nor prepared for a partner, yet yearning for one. That did not work. I had some growing up to do first.
handbook for single introverts in their 30s who feel like that ship sailed a long time ago.
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6aefa63600608191ba730f78533db177
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50408802
It is not the gotcha you think it is.
I think their comment is the most beautiful thing I've seen today; I'm so glad they left it here.
(As a side note, I wish titles were more fitting to the article, vs. trying to bait clicks with catchy titles that often suggest a different topic.)
"Hey lonely HN nerds, wipe the tear from your eye and come read about microbe survival times in salt, permafrost, and open space"? Something else? I'm open to suggestions.
I'm not thrilled with this kind of clickbait-y title, but when you're subscribed to the blog, you know what it's likely to be about and ignore that, and the problem only appears here when this context is lost.
Don't listen to the people who try to change you, only accept change if it comes from within although it is possible for this to happen because of how others interact with you and how that makes you feel. Don't change just because someone else says you should be more like them. Then you become their puppet, not your own person.
Also, don't be a dick.
In my 20s and early 30s whenever I left the city sometimes on the weekends, I'd feel this FOMO like I'm missing something fun.
Something changed as I got older. I think around the pandemic. When I was in the city on a beautiful day, I felt this sad feeling like I should be in nature instead.
I eventually got a place in the country. Now that I'm not single, I couldn't give two craps about going out, meeting people, and I hate crowds and noise. There's no greater pleasure than sitting and listening to water sounds outside, reading and studying.
People are overrated, but you need them sometimes. Don't feel bad about being an introvert.
And if you think you know yourself, this is silly, it's easy, you don't know even what you're missing. I once thought that. Now I see that nobody really knows themself completely.
To answer the question, you should really not “wait” for anything in life anymore past 30. At some point between 35-45 you will likely cross the halfway point of your life and will begin the journey of being on your way out. Life has a cadence, and it’s not fun to be past that point still “waiting” for things you thought you’d have.
Obviously this advice will hit differently for people past a certain age, I’m mostly talking to people in their 20s. They can be saved, but others it may be too late.
You must actualize the person you want to be as early as you can, so you can maximize your time in life being that person. That’s when you will have “arrived” to your life, and can focus on just living instead of constantly chasing who you want to be. If you don’t, you might never get there, and then in the end if you think too much you’ll realize your life will have been a waste. That is a private hell.
At some point, if you wait too long, there may no longer be enough time or resources to actually live the life destined for you, and then it’s all over. Your chance at life expires: dreams unfinished, like cutting off in the middle of sente
"They are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive severe conditions – such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation – that would quickly kill most other forms of life. They have survived exposure to outer space." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade
Since the author is here: stray 'y' there, probably. Fun read, though, especially mere hours after finishing Project Hail Mary.