BLINK ! modernity just moved the goalposts for life in the universe

Humanity’s REAL opiate crisis is that great ‘opiate of the masses’ : space travel

I don’t think my position on life in the Universe is very different from most biologically-oriented scientists who have studied the requirements.

Microbial life, even microbial life based on non-water solvents in wildly different temperature and pressure regimes than Earth, is probable and even common throughout the Universe.

Even if most of it existed a billion years before humans arrived or will exist a billion years after we are gone.

Or that most of it exists on planets it would take humans a billion years to travel to and then a billion years back home again —- to a human home that no longer exists.

Lifeforms we can’t even see with the naked eye let alone ever communicate and trade with.

Now un-noticed by everybody, my arch-opponent ,Modernity has come to accept that Life in the Universe means just a handful of slow-reproducing microbes living in molten cold ammonia deep under the crust of some distant hell-hole of a planet.

 The start was when Modernity gradually accepted that Earth’s extremophile microbes are real (but not that they are, in their own way, as evolutionarily as clever as humans).

The discovery that some microbes can exist under unbelievable extreme conditions here on Earth has helped Modernity balance its surprise and disappointment that conditions on the Universe’s other planets is very unlikely (as in almost certainly never) to be as human-friendly as the planet we evolved upon.

Why should we expect them to be : every planet is a very complex balance of hundreds of absolutely critical factors : if you recall the simple arithmetic of permutations and combinations, that tells you each is likely truly unique on the fine scale needed to support humans in human like settings.

This, despite the fact that there are probably a trillion times a trillion planets out there.

That’s the good news : because the bad news is that Space is not like crowded but tiny Hong Kong, but rather more like large and empty NWT.

And our production schedules on making all those Warp Drives and Hyper-Drives and Worm Hole Inducers to speed us to the other end of the Universe in a nano-second are waaaaaaaay behind their original due dates : even before covid-19.

So Modernity has come to share the rest of humanity’s quite modest dream of one day discovering there are a few invisible microbes out there on planet x, reproducing once every millennium, alive - just barely - in the super chilled liquid ammonia or methane, deep under the surface.

Big deal !

Its a far cry from what Modernity promised itself and us in its heyday 1875-1965 : that the whole Universe was one vast untapped new market for the entrepreneurial masters of that universe.

A Universe filled with vaguely human like aliens living on resource rich planets.

Exactly why we might want to make contact with other alien civilizations speaks loudly to the arrogance of Modernity-Man : they simply blithely assumed these civilizations would be more primitive than us.

I am a kind of a glass-half-empty guy : I was willing to bet that some alien nations would be much smarter civilizations than us , eager to kill and eat us or merely enslave us.

But Modernity saw only other planets as being rich in resources and filled with little green men and women willing to work for even lower wages than Mexicans would.

I always insist that even more than the rise of the modern civil rights movements in the mid-sixties, Modernity lost its total hegemony in those same mid-sixties with the fly-pasts of Venus and Mars that revealed they were even more deadly to human life than space travel’s harshest critics had ever allowed.

Modernity recovered quickly because on a day to day basis, Modernity was only using the possibility of an easy escape to other planets to newly plunder as the reason why they argued we shouldn’t fear that their environmental destructiveness would kill the only golden goose the rest of humanity has ever discovered : Earth itself.

If the search for life out there had to be scaled back to seeing a few invisible microbes deep under the liquid ammonia out there so be it ; if abandoning Earth like an used condom meant totally geo-planing Mars at a return on investment of a negative 100 million percent, so be it.

They were just opiates for the masses anyway : one Big Lie is as good as another.

For Modernity proponents don’t really, at a deep emotional level, think beyond their own lifetime: as long as they continue to be free to plunder this planet, let their grandchildren struggle how to live and plunder under Mar’s harsh climes...