Any one of these things would be a massive boon to our understanding of life throughout the solar system and broader universe, right down even to here on Earth. All three of them would arguably mark a new era in Earth's history.
we are very screwed if they find life on Mars. It means life is incredibly common and thus the Great Filter theory is true and we only have a few years left as a species most likely.
I find it extremely hard to believe you could kill every human being on earth at this point. We’ve reached critical mass, we aren’t going anywhere. When we had that few thousand individuals population bottleneck in the past was when it was dicey. What sort of event could kill every human and end our species? I can only think of planet-wide extinction events like massive asteroid impacts that sterilized the whole earth. And we haven’t ever had one of those in billions of years. Call me too optimistic but I think humans are too resourceful. Some of us would survive anything smaller.
I wonder what a huge Carrington solar storm would do to humanity. If electricity went out everywhere, transformers burned up all over, electronics fried. If this caused transport failures, mass starvation could follow. I really hope a severe solar storm would not be as bad as that and hopefully someone could enlighten me on this.
> If this caused transport failures, mass starvation could follow.
The good news is that a substantial chunk of the world's cargo transportation runs on diesel (or other combustion setups similarly not reliant on electronics), so in a pinch it could probably keep going. Same with agricultural machinery. Might need to replace or refurbish some ECUs, but I'm sure there are enough clever mechanics out there willing and able to bypass those in an emergency that we'd be back up and running pretty quick on that front.
ICE 1, electric 0 ;)
It's refrigeration that'd have me more concerned, since pretty much all modern refrigeration is electrically powered (last I checked). Diesel generators might come in clutch there, assuming the refrigeration units themselves don't rely on any fancy electronics.
>I wonder what a huge Carrington solar storm would do to humanity
Worst case it sets us back to 1870ish, maybe. Depends on how fast things go to crap vs how fast things can be rebuilt.
Likely case you'd basically get a "purge" because society as we know it can't keep on rolling with the kind of economic breakdown something like that would cause so there's be a lot of dying in the interim but if you don't starve or get shot in the first 6mo you're probably good with the very old, very young and unproductive bearing the brunt of it (same as every other disaster) It would be like the black death, but global and all at once. Balance of power globally would definitely be altered in unforeseeable ways but the overall net result is things would bounce back hard.
Killing literally every single human being is not easy. Sure, killing off half of humanity is pretty easy to conceive, but to kill all of humanity it takes a lot more work.
There have been at least five mass extinction events in the last 500 million years. The most recent one wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs, after they had dominated the earth for 100 million years. Tool-using apes with language have been around for less than 5 million. I think it’s far too early to say we’ll survive the next extinction event, or even make it that far before diverging into new species.
> When we had that few thousand individuals population bottleneck in the past was when it was dicey.
Yeah, but those individuals were presumably all in pretty close proximity to one another. If we were left with a few thousand individuals across the entire range of the human-inhabited Earth, we'd have one heck of a time continuing as a species.
In any case, the risk of an extinction event on Earth is exactly why I believe space colonization needs to be Priority Zero for humanity, from two different angles:
1. Living beyond Earth means that we as a species are that much more resilient against a literal-Earth-shattering catastrophe (and if we can get the bulk of Earth's current/future population off of Earth, then we might very well be able to avoid a couple different plausible extinction events).
2. If we can colonize entirely inhospitable worlds like Mars or the Moon (or my votes, Ceres, Venus, and Enceladus), then "colonizing" Earth is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy even if it does become Venus 2: Greenhouse Boogaloo.
Disagree. If there is a filter at all then it could easily be that we’ve already passed it. Maybe the filter is the formation of multicellular life, for example. Also, Earth and Mars have exchanged a lot of material. If we find Mars life, it would not at all be surprising to learn it is related to Earth life.
It's hard to imagine that the change from unicellular life to multicellular life is a great filter. Even single cell life has evolved to crazy complexity that blurs the lines between single and multicellular life.
> If we find Mars life, it would not at all be surprising to learn it is related to Earth life.
If it's DNA/RNA based, we might actually be able to determine the relationship and whether that's true or not.
Earth is pretty special. We’ve got a big ol’ moon (seriously, the Moon is huge for a planet our size), Jupiter running interference for us with its massive gravity and incomprehensible magnetic field, our host star is very polite, we’ve even got a magnetic field AND ozone layer on the planet itself. Not to mention it’s kept life going for 30% of the age of the universe. It’s a good CV for Great Filter applications.
Any one of these things would be a massive boon to our understanding of life throughout the solar system and broader universe, right down even to here on Earth. All three of them would arguably mark a new era in Earth's history.