Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Boy, Lemmy sucks donkey dick. For every one legitimate answer there are two or three edgelord answers like "capitalism" and "the internet".
Here's an answer that hasn't come up yet: cooperation among mono cellular organisms. I don't mean the development of polyp analogues or colonies of single celled organisms; I mean getting down to mitochondria. Brace for wild oversimplification.
Before mitochondria, life had a hard time creating enough energy to do much more than barely stay alive. The current line of thinking is that one organism ate another and didn't digest it. The two organisms worked symbiotically, one handled energy production and the other handled getting food and staying alive.
Just about every living thing utilizes mitochondria and if the current idea that mitochondria were actually symbiotic organisms is true, that means that what was likely a chance "sparing" of prey is the underpinning of all complex life.
The odds of that happening are ridiculously low. There could be simple life in tons of places even within our own star system, but if the mitochondria-like symbiotic capture never happens for those extraterrestrial organisms, then complex life is probably unlikely to develop.
Maybe cooperation is hard wired just like competition. It might be less likely but hardly impossible.
I'd hardly describe it that way. It took untold trillions of predator/prey interactions over the hundreds of millions of years that single celled life existed for it to happen. That's more or less brute forcing the problem and it took geologic timescales to happen.
If you ask me to point at a hurdle stopping civilizations from developing that looks awfully reasonable.
Ultimately we don't know much about that era of time, but I suspect it was less like fumbling around for millions of years looking for a light switch, and more like the gradual warming of the planet with warmer and cooler seasons/years.
Iirc at least one of the other things related to development of eukaryotes was that atmospheric oxygen had to first be generated by early cyanobacteria.
So maybe that proverbial light switch was being flipped millions of times through random encounters but only became more viable after the voltage (atmospheric oxygen levels) became high enough. Maybe that's the reason it took hundreds of millions of years, because transforming by bacteria just takes that long.
We just don't know unfortunately. However, we DO know about species getting wiped out by asteroids or human cultures getting wiped out by disease or conflict with superior cultures. Any of these filters seems more of a hurdle to me than the development of eukaryotes.