For those who think this is near a coin flip, I'm genuinely curious, do you think there are countless Earthlike planets out there with life? Or is there something special about Mars

@spiderduckpig my bets are on panspermia after doing some research. This paper was helpful.
https://www.academia.edu/download/73021401/icar.1999.631720211018-25764-1uspef6.pdf The authors found that transfer of native mars life to earth given the existence of native mars life was "highly probable," and section 8.2 talks about earth native life transfers to mars.

I don't think earth was much more likely to produce life per unit time than mars while it was habitable for life (given that it was once habitable of which I am quite confident)

This is crazy high wtf

@spider why do you think so

@Bayesian I think abiogenesis is very unlikely

@spiderduckpig No non-earth earthlike planets have abiogenesis so far and we can't use earth to update prior because of observation selection effects

@spiderduckpig
1) panspermia is allowed in this market and rocks and stuff travel between earth and mars pretty often
2) earth developed life very quickly after it became earthlike and assuming intelligent life evolved on earth in an average amount of time, life could have developed like a billion years later than it did for identical observation selection to take place (I think, I don't know stats) before earth stopped being habitable. This leads me to believe that its pretty easy for life to develop on earthlike planets. I'm pretty sure we think Mars had earthlike conditions for a while, so it seems likely that life could have developed independently there.

Want to fill my limit order?

@MaxE

>panspermia is allowed in this market and rocks and stuff travel between earth and mars pretty often

I think it's pretty likely for matter to fall to a planet but not that common for matter to transfer from one planet to another, I am very uninformed on this though

>earth developed life very quickly after it became earthlike and assuming intelligent life evolved on earth in an average amount of time, life could have developed like a billion years later than it did for identical observation selection to take place (I think, I don't know stats)

Imo, we cannot assume intelligent life on Earth evolved in an average amount of time at all, because of anthropic bias. We can model the emergence of life or the emergence of intelligent life as a sequence of low-probability events, and we can't evaluate the probability of those events because of anthropic bias.

For example, it could be exceedingly improbable for genetic material and ribosomes (or any equivalent mechanism) to arise in the same closed environment. We cannot use the fact that it happened at least once, because if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't be around to observe that scenario. Earth is going to be unreasonably "lucky" compared to an average planet when it comes to these events because we are here to observe them, so those events must've succeeded. I'd bet earth developed intelligent life many OOMs faster than the expected value

@spiderduckpig cant we infer something about the speed that intelligence develops given that we could have developed later? Wouldn't we have developed very close before earth became uninhabitable if it was so unlikely for intelligence to develop earlier?

@MaxE I think the development of life at all is an even bigger barrier

@spiderduckpig wouldnt life have taken longer to evolve on earth, then? it took very little time for it to on earth iirc. You cant say we can glean no information because we live here because if it were so unlikely I would expect intelligence to develop very soon before earth became uninhabitable

@MaxE I think the probability of abiogenesis would be pretty uniformly distributed over the time that earth is habitable/has those primordial ocean environments, it wouldn't like build up over time

Edit: though I guess if we update on the fact that intelligent life exists at the current time, the probability would be a bit higher towards the early end because intelligent life needs some time to evolve

@spiderduckpig looking at multiple estimates and assuming a constant time for intelligence to show up after life does, life showed up in the first .9BY out of the 2BY it could have in the best case for your side and the first .2BY out of the 2.25BY it could have in the best case for mine.

Not sure who those numbers help but they're here

So that's like a 45% to 9% p-value, it is pretty interesting that life (probably) arose so quickly, but I don't know if I'm convinced that abiogenesis is likely. There is no evidence of other abiogenesis events. There is the compelling argument that once life evolved, it made it significantly less likely for other life to emerge, but wouldn't there at least be some evidence or remnants of other abiogenesis events? There are plenty of different ecological niches, and plenty of room for biodiversity, and is it really true that early life immediately monopolized all of the earth's resources?

The wording of the question is pretty confusing. I propose changing it to, "In 2100, what will be the scientific consensus on whether life ever originated on Mars?"

@spider : i also initially thought it was just about having a consensus, even if the consensus is "no life" it would have resolved "yes".

i think this should be clarified

got confused a second time about this.

at least I had this old comment to remember 😆

Currently manifold thinks there is a 78% chance of AGI by 2048.

If argue that AGI would massively increase our ability to answer the question posed by this market so this market should be well above 2048.

I also think probably Manifold over predicts the likelihood of AGI

@ChrisEdwards crap I massively misread the wording

@ChrisEdwards note that this question is about whether there is life on mars; so if there is no life on mars no agi will help us conclude that there is

@ChrisEdwards same here, I think it's the marsians messing with our heads

I think the price is decent, if anyone's more confident than me I'm selling my position at 88%

@Bayesian I mixed up the title, thought the price was the equivalent of 12%. So uh. should have sold ig.

A consensus that there was life, or a consensus either way?

@RemiRampin That there was life