/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15069098
>dude this plant can grow on a space rock see? life is everywhere

This ignores all the other infinitely complex shit that had to happen in our evolution to get to to the point where we could even think about life on other planets. It's truly an improbable miracle that we're doing what we're doing and it's extremely unlikely we'll find the same thing happening only a few thousand planets down the block

>>11242746
You live on a planet where the Americans and Russians stared each other down pointing at each other with nuclear weapons ready to devastate the entire planet at a hair's trigger, with a combined arsenal of 75,000 nuclear warheads at the peak.

Declassified Soviet files after the end of the Cold War show that MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine, which mantained that a nuclear war was unlikely to happen because both sides were too scared to do it, was a completely myth, the Soviets actually believed in a winnable nuclear was scenario and assumed the Americans also did, so they were even developing a Dead Hand system of automatic retaliation to defend against a decapitation strike.

So yeah, we were willing to destroy the entire planet in nuclear war to prevent the enemy from winning, and came close to it in 1983 (Soviet defense alert system fails and reports 7 American ICBMs heading for Russia), 1996 (Yeltsin activates the nuclear football in response to a Norwegian satellite confused for an ICBM) and freaking 1999 (Pristina Airport Standoff between Russia and NATO almost causes WW3).

The possibility of satellite debris doesn't even matter compared to how far governments are willing to do to ensure their survival and supremacy.