Szilard is an underrated genius. Also was an early formulator of the nuclear chain reaction concept, to tap into nuclear energy, but did not zero in uranium right at the outset as the element to make it feasible.
> likely result would be employers forcing people to take the drug
How so? You can just... refuse? And do you prefer sleeping to working? Doing a job that you hate for 8h and sleeping for 8h is much worse than doing a job that you love for 16h. Something to think about.
In addition to what Qem said, some people don't have much control over their job opportunities, take whatever they can get, and in those roles do whatever they're ordered to do.
Amazon piss bottles come to mind.
Even without malice or orders, sometimes every actor in the economy can be locally motivated in a way that ends up the same. Boss gives you 40 hours, but rent is too high for a 40-hour week? Guess you're taking two jobs now.
It would be like doping in some elite sports, say road race cycling in Lance Armstrong era. Nobody would be coerced by force, but some people would start taking it, making less sleep time the new normal. With time business would adjust to expect and require it, and other people would be forced to take the drug just to not become unemployable in a market with a upshifted baseline. I think this is already happening in education, with ADHD medications. Children are likely being overdiagnosed, because in a environment with many medicated children, just displaying normal child behaviour starts looking odd, pathology-like.
> Doing a job that you hate for 8h and sleeping for 8h is much worse than doing a job that you love for 16h.
Some jobs just suck but somebody still has to do them.
Likely we don't need to replicate. We just need to get a sample of life with completely independent origin to our kind of life here on Earth, to study. This way we would be able to separate what are universal properties for any life from historical contingencies specific to us. To have samples of a single kind of life complicates things.
Were that to happen it could be the worst news humanity ever receives, since it would greatly increase the chance the "Great Filter" is in front of us, not behind us.
The Milky Way is almost 14 billion years old. The Milky Way is perhaps 100K light-years in diameter. If you can travel at 0.1c you could colonize the Milky Way in perhaps around a million years, less than 0.01% of the age of the Milky Way.
So, either there's a filter that's blocked interstellar colonization... or it has occurred already, and we just aren't aware of it (some sort of dark forest thing / we are being secretly watched by an extraterrestrial civilization).
These sort of calculations are nothing but examples of how a bad model gives bad results. In this case, the model is bad because it's underspecified.
Saying "I have a bad model but there's some unknown Great Factor which would make it a good model" isn't very convincing.
There are myriad factors: the biological challenges of space travel constitute a long list in itself; the economics and politics involved (ROI on any useful timeframe for interstellar travel is zero); the engineering challenges (the vast majority of interstellar travel attempts will result in the death of all crew somewhere in interstellar space); the fact that over million-year timescales, species evolve and change - humans are only around 30% of a million years old.
There is no need for an organized, unified project for life to spread across the galaxy, any more than there's a need for a unified effort for bacteria and fungi to consume some tasty organic matter, or for humans to have spread across Earth in prehistory.
Not if it's just microbial life. Anyway it's just one case or another. We knowing what's the case doesn't change it. If the news never break it would be just as bad, perhaps even slightly worse, as we would not have early warning to prepare.
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