The Community
General Category => Matters of Life and The Universe => Topic started by: Zzzptm on January 24, 2023, 10:20:08 AM
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis
Interesting solution to the Fermi Paradox - life may be inherently unstable or, worse, toxic to itself to the point where microbial life wrecks things for itself and then fizzles out. We had the Great Oxygenation here on Earth and it seems that Mars may have had its own events in which life there snuffed itself out for the most part.
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It's been a while, but I finally had time to check this out. I had never heard of it before, or if I had, I don't recall. So as you read what follows, keep in mind it is coming from someone who doesn't know much about it.
But, I don't think there's really much about this hypothesis to understand.
The basis of Dr. Wolf's Medea Hypothesis seems to be that there is a directive towards self-destruction encoded into the biological makeup of multicellular organisms. On the surface that doesn't seem unreasonable; multicellular organisms seem to possess an encoding for reproduction and survival, there's no reason to suspect that they can't also possess the encoding for self-destruction as well. Such that at some point a switch is flipped (most likely after reproduction) and they start working towards shutting themselves down.
Dr. Wolf claims this drive is not part of the makeup of single-cell organisms (by omission, he doesn't state those words, but that is the implication). Clearly they possess the other two I mentioned, why not the "death-drive" as well? I couldn't find anything that makes that clear.
From an objective logic standpoint, his hypothesis fails spectacularly. Assuming our "rules of rationalization" have some alignment with reality. If not, well, then that's a whole other thing.
Ultimately, I disagree and feel the Medea Hypothesis is merely an interesting fiction that could serve as the basis of an "end-times" action movie.
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While I'm not sold on the death-drive thing, I do consider how the advent of life resulted in massive changes in the earth - particularly the Great Oxygenation - which now have rendered this planet as one that supports life, but could not in this condition start it all over again.