As a hot take I’m not incentivized to respond seriously, but I will say that Carbon-based life as we know it on Earth is seriously antifragile. We’ve found life in the most inhospitable places we can imagine and the kicker is it’s all self-replicating and self-healing.
Yes, we’re meat sacks that pop when poked — that’s a very conserved trait of life on Earth — but for the most part, especially with a holistic view like at a species level, we’re ridiculously hardy.
> We’ve found life in the most inhospitable places we can imagine
...on Earth. Take away something as simple as the magnetic field of the planet and suddenly resilient life narrows down to a couple of bacteria, Archaea, or Tardigrades [0] which still die with enough exposure.
Anything above 120 degrees C will also cook our goose and every other form of life, again short of a few Archaea [1] which still die a few degrees later.
And then there's the most basic of all: water without which some life doesn't die but doesn't exactly "live" either. A handful of spores, spore-like forms, or completely dried forms of bacteria for example can go for eons without water but they're not functioning.
And the higher level and complex the organism (thus possibly easier to recognize as life), the higher the chances one of the "subsystems" is more fragile and its failure kills the organism.
I don't think life can be evaluated as a snapshot in a moment of time. Life is a process, and it affects a population. I think even the most conservative definitions may agree on that.
Antifragility plays well with this definition: it doesn't describe the state, but the potential and the ability to change. Taking into account the huge populations, and the fact that only a couple individuals must survive hardship in order for life to prevail, I can see the antifragility.
That "we can imagine" is doing a lot of the work, there. We humans are pretty limited in experience, operating parameters and yes, imagination. On but one dimension, consider the range of all possible temperatures and how narrow the band in which the lifeforms of which we have knowledge can survive. Consider the same along all other dimensions like radiation, gravity, pressure, particulate density, magnetic field intensity, perhaps others we have not even discovered yet.
Carbon life that we know about is "robust" only considering the relatively narrow ranges on our own planet.
The range of all possible temperatures is theoretically infinite. Life as we know it — without protection — can survive at everything from 0K to 386K (113C). As humans we have harnessed temperatures in the 100s of millions of degrees (fusion) safely and can build machines that reliably extend our operating parameters far beyond their normal bounds.
It’s easy to be dismissive, but the reality is that life as we know it is pretty freaking incredible.
enkid's people have had a remote outpost near the center for some time now. They have not reported finding any life so far there but can we really trust them after the Saturn 3 disaster?
Yes, we’re meat sacks that pop when poked — that’s a very conserved trait of life on Earth — but for the most part, especially with a holistic view like at a species level, we’re ridiculously hardy.