In this thread I'm going to write some science fiction. It's not going to have any characters or plot, it's just some wild speculation about what we'll find in the Universe in the coming decades. It's not meant to be a prediction, it's just a plausible story invented for fun. - ThreadSky

nathanielvirgo.bsky.social • 57 days ago

In this thread I'm going to write some science fiction. It's not going to have any characters or plot, it's just some wild speculation about what we'll find in the Universe in the coming decades. It's not meant to be a prediction, it's just a plausible story invented for fun.

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nathanielvirgo.bsky.social•57 days ago

The origin of life on Earth took place a long time ago. We don't know how it happened and we never will, though not for the reasons you think. It gave rise to many weird and wonderful lineages of microbes, but one was so successful it drove all the others to extinction. (Microbes can go extinct!)

nathanielvirgo.bsky.social•57 days ago

Because of this, all the life we knew of prior to the 21st century was descended from a single common ancestor. Space missions of the mid-late 20th century had revealed what appeared to be a dead Solar system, and the telescopes of the time revealed no obvious signs of life among the stars.

nathanielvirgo.bsky.social•57 days ago

As a result, in the early 21st century the view was widely held that we are alone: life, and especially intelligent life, was rare in the universe if it existed at all. (At least, this was the view often presented to the public. The private opinions of scientists were in truth rather diverse.)

nathanielvirgo.bsky.social•57 days ago

The first evidence against this came from Mars, in the form of an experiment to detect nucleic acids via technology developed for gene editing. It was a stroke of luck that this was sent to Mars at all, as there was no guarantee of success: even if life existed there it might not have DNA at all.

nathanielvirgo.bsky.social•57 days ago

But the instrument was small and was able to piggyback on another mission. Its success was profound. It not only detected DNA but could partially sequence it. At first the sequences seemed random, though there was concern about contamination because a few resembled known sequences from Earth.

nathanielvirgo.bsky.social•57 days ago

However, over time it became clear that we were looking at something else. Life on Mars did share an ancestor with life on Earth, but they had diverged billions of years ago, *before* the last common ancestor of life on Earth.

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