Are you serious? They really have what amounts to an exoskeleton? Or maybe it’s more accurate to call it a whole-body rib cage?
Just searched and found this fun article. Not really a skeleton but a collection of really stiff hairs or feathers (loosely: the genes are the same ones responsible for “other skin appendages” in vertebrates).
Interesting. That page says “few vertebrae”, but the image makes it look to me like a full set.
On the other hand, if I found an animal with no ribs and pelvis and only the rudimentary limbs typically found in fish, I’d tend to say that the skeleton was missing. Or at least, ahem, skeletal.
Thanks. My first impression was that there was some funny business, but then I found what I thought was a decent article.
I mean, isn’t the entire concept of the Fermi paradox that given the universe is so large and old, it seems surprising that we see no signs of aliens anywhere, and therefore some explanation must exist for why we have not? That’s more focused on intelligent life than extraterrestrial life of any sort I suppose, but given it’s even named a paradox in the first place, someone must find it surprising
My argument of that is that we’ve only just started looking in a massive, massive, massive universe. Like, the other day. The big bang theory is less than a hundred years old and we only just discovered cosmic background radiation in 1964
We JUST started looking and we probably have no idea what we are looking for or at.
Also, these earth like planets are a fucking guess, a giant maybe. They make their host star, which we make assumptions of about their size, make a tiny hardly perceptible dip in light and we measure the wavelengts that were filtered out.
The more I learn about how this science is done, the more it all just looks like a big fucking maybe that someone spouts so confidently as fact. Like, the track record for fact is pretty thin in science.
The Fermi Paradox feels like someone sticking their finger in the water at the beach and confidently declaring there are no whales in the ocean because they didn’t touch one.
I guess people tend to look to astronomers for information about space, while the Fermi paradox probably borders more on philosophy than on astronomy. And in a lot of people minds philosophers are not real scientists, unlike astronomers.
In addition to the other helpful replies, one of the major flaws of the Fermi paradox is that it fails to account for the vastness of time. Our failure to observe spacefaring intelligent life is the metaphorical equivalent of a baby born at some point in human history somewhere on earth, opening it’s eyes only long enough to blink, and not observing Cher. It doesn’t mean that Cher doesn’t exist, or even that Cher should be observable given that humanity is so large and old.
My favourite is the idea that it takes time to build out the “infrastructure” that allows for life. Basically, no supernovae, no life, not enough supernovae, extremely low probability of life. Even if that doesn’t put Earth’s life near the leading edge, we may be on the leading edge of technological civilizations.
I’d also point out that we’ve nearly wiped ourselves out several times, and we’re headed towards making our planet incompatible with life. If the conditions for life exist AND life evolves to be sentient AND the sentient life develops communication AND the communication fosters cooperation AND the cooperation leads to technology AND that technology allows the life to survive the vastness of space AND the technology allows for interstellar travel, all that progress could end with a meteor or a virus or a particularly strong solar storm that blows through the magnetosphere and takes our atmosphere with it.
The conditions for sentient technological species exist on earth, and humans are the only ones even close to surviving in space. Dolphins, octopodes, dinosaurs, corvids nothing else is even sharing arbitrary knowledge yet. For that to even happen, we’d probably all need to be dead.
I hate the term earth-like when all they really mean is rocky surface with signs of maybe water.
Nevermind if it’s a frozen wasteland. Nevermind if it’s atmosphere is made of sulphuric acid like Venus. Nevermind if it’s so close to it’s star that it’s tidally locked and half of it is a constant inferno. It’s “earth-like”!
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