On alien life

This article explains why the author thinks finding evidence of life on Mars would be a bad thing.

These kind of arguments annoy me because they seem to contain a basic error. Science, like any belief system, is based on faith. In the case of science, it’s faith in the assumptions that underpin the scientific method. One of these assumptions is that the observable universe is solely the product of the operation of natural laws, i.e. that it is pristine and natural.

The problem with the Fermi Paradox is that it uses this assumption as evidence. However, we have no reason for believing that the assumption is true. We just have to accept it on faith.

Let’s assume that an intelligent technological species evolved somewhere in our galaxy several billion years ago. They built von Neumann machines and sent them off to colonise the galaxy.

If I were designing those machines, I’d give them another purpose on top of replicating themselves. I would programme them to seed life in suitable places – for example, rocky planets at the right distance from their sun to have liquid water on their surface, like our planet. The easiest way of doing this would be to reconfigure the stuff that was already there (basic amino acids etc) and let it develop naturally. If one of those machines rolled up here about 3.8 billion years ago and did this, the end result would be what we have now.