Life on Mars

in the late afternoon on Wednesday, the 30th of April 2008 by Chad

Nick Bostrom talks about life on Mars and why it would be a bad thing.

But I hope that our Mars probes discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.
Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form–some bacteria, some algae–it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life-form we found, the more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting, certainly–but a bad omen for the future of the human race.

Essentially he looks for what he calls the Great Filter: some evolutionary event so unlikely that it was all but impossible that it happened here and we’re alive to know about it. This Great Filter is what keeps us from seeing thousands upon thousands of ETs out there. He posits that it may be something that will happen not just in our past but in our future. Of course he has to go on with the oh so typical “we’re going to nuke ourselves into oblivion” that just makes your eyes glaze over, but the rest of the article was pretty interesting to think about.

Still, the most insightful thing was a comment left about the article.