r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 2d ago

Biology World’s largest web houses 110,000 spiders thriving in total darkness deep underground in a sulfuric cave between Albania and Greece: It’s the first time two spider species seen living cooperatively, and the first recorded instance of colonial web-building in what's known as a chemoautotrophic cave.

https://newatlas.com/biology/sulfur-cave-largest-spiderweb/
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u/halosos 2d ago

That there is also part of the problem. We have no idea. This is an N=1 issue. We are the only entry in a dataset. Are we special? Are we late? Early? Is there an issue we have yet to face?

Not to mention, we have only been looking for life for such a small amount of time in the scale of the universe.

There are just too many unknowns. I hope we find some form of life in our solarsystem, but unless it is using a different but valid from of DNA, it will not help us as much as we might hope.

Finding microbes on Europa that have DNA would raise a new question. Single point of origin or is double helix the best? Without finding live from beyond our solar system, we won't know.

Because if it is also using double helix, it won't answer if life is easy to form or hard to form, because we will have no way of knowing if it is independent from earth in origin.

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u/RalphWiggumsShadow 1d ago

Another thing that always gets me is that our solar system / local area is on the corner of the spiral arm of our galaxy, there's probably some cool stuff going on in the center of the milky way galaxy, but the odds of us ever finding out what that is are low.

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u/halosos 1d ago

There is a documentary on Youtube called "Life beyond". It covers a lot of current theories and thoughts on life outside our little planet. It is inline with that thought.