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A New Constraint on the Drake Equation
- jessaustin 10y agoTFA has the same problem the Drake equation has in general. We lack the insight to judge whether -24 is a reasonable exponent. Why shouldn't it be -35, or any other number?
- cortesoft 10y agoI don't think the paper is arguing whether it is a reasonable exponent or not. They are just saying IF the exponent is -24 or smaller, then there is more than one technologically advanced species. It makes no claim about how close to reality that exponent is.
- jessaustin 10y agoRight, TFA is at least as pointless as the Drake equation itself.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoPersonally, I find these miss one of the key points. Today, we can kill everyone off with an exchange of the already existing nuclear weapon inventory. But that requires a reasonably large number of people to make mistakes or take action. We're in the process of killing everyone off by screwing up the natural climate process which requires a large number of people to commit to inaction. Within this century we will have the means and the understanding for a single individual to craft a DNA based pathogen that can infect and kill nearly everyone on the planet. These are the three tests for graduation into the club of "long lived intelligent species." Fail any one of them and you don't make it. I call them: * Action of the group * Inaction of the group * Action of the individual We apparently passed test 1, we're not doing so well on test 2, and we'll have to be a lot better at eradicating hate in individuals if we want to have a hope of passing test #3.
- Erik816 10y agoLet's hope it's a lot harder than you think to reach step three. If we ever reach a point where a lone actor can destroy humanity, we're pretty well screwed. You would have to ensure that 100% of the people with that ability didn't want to use it 100% of the time.
- contravariant 10y agoLuckily the number of people who want to exterminate all of humanity seems to be rather low. Which just leaves the people who want to exterminate part of humanity.
- adrianN 10y agoI'm hopeful that once technology like gene editing that has that potential is so cheap and easy that a significant fraction of the people can do it, the same technology that enables them to create killer viruses also enables everyone else to cure them more effectively.
- arcticfox 10y agoIt's beside the point, but IMO the human species is at almost zero risk of extinction from climate change. Maybe you could find a better example. The worst case would certainly be a calamity, but it would require an immense amount of additional failure for humanity to actually go extinct from it.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoThere's a difference between biological extinction and cultural extinction. Cultures are incredibly fragile, and the chances of developing current levels of science and technology again if we lost them aren't all that great. As for runaway climate change - it's definitely a possibility. Current models don't try to estimate potential coupling between the effects of methane and CO2. It doesn't seem to be considered likely. But a lot of scientists are already surprised by the speed and scale of climate change, and the fact that we're seeing effects in a decade or two that weren't expected until the end of the century. Worries about runaway climate change may be pessimistic, but they're certainly not unscientific. Considering the stakes, more research would be wise.
- amelius 10y ago> We find that as long as the probability that a habitable zone planet develops a technological species is larger than ∼10^−24, humanity is not the only time technological intelligence has evolved. I wonder how they turn a statement based on a probability into a statement that is an absolute truth (no probabilities involved).
- keithwarren 10y agoMichael Crichton tears up the Drake Equation (and SETI) pretty thoroughly in his speech entitled Aliens Cause Global Warming. http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers... "...the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested..." -Crichton
- shmageggy 10y agoWhile it may be apocryphal, it's said that Drake described the equation as a means of "organizing our ignorance". That is, it's not meant to be applied literally, but rather as a means of focusing discussion on the relevant parameters. In that sense, I think it's been phenomenally successful.
- monocasa 10y agoExactly. First step in knowing something like that is putting into words what we don't know. And it's not insurmountable; the data from the Kepler spacecraft is giving us quite a bit of data that may go a long way to building a statistical model for one of the unknown variables.
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- drewrv 10y agoThe fact that the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero is precisely the point. There is a "right" answer and we can get closer and closer to it if we choose what to study properly. We know a lot more about exoplanets now than we did in 2003. We're moving on to find out how many are in the Goldilocks zone, or how many contain water. Our idea of what to plug in is slowly getting better. Pointing out that the Drake equation is technically not science since it doesn't involve testable hypotheses is pointless pedantry. Call it statistics then. Or metaphysics. Or a thought experiment.
- 4e1a 10y agoWhat about ancient Vimana and places like ankor wat? Wouldn't that suggest that technological species happened at least twice on the same star?
- hugh4 10y agoAngkor Wat was built in the twelfth century AD, and is well within the known technological capabilities of the Khmer empire at the time. A vimana, which from googling appears to be some kind of flying temple in Sanskrit myths, does not appear to have actually existed.
- hololight 10y agoVimana seems to mean any of several ancient flying machines
- 4e1a 10y agoVimana are not unique to India and there are references from all over the world and include the Egyptian Saqqara Bird, the pre-Columbian golden airplane models, the Greek Icarus legend, the Chariot of Ezekiel, the Nazca runways (lines), The Abydos carvings, The Tassili rock paintings from Algeria and the Chinese references to Lu Ban’s wooden aircraft that flew great distances. Naturally, these references are often dismissed by modern historians as simply impossible but there can be no doubt that humanity has a collective memory of have once been able to fly in ancient times.
- srtjstjsj 10y agocorrectio: > a collective memory of having once DESIRED to fly in ancient times
- simonh 10y agoOr even just to have worshiped flying beings. Modern fiction is full of fantastical and impossible things. Are we to believe that people in the ancient world were incapable of flights of fancy and everything they wrote and made must be taken absolutely literally?
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agostarted from here, now we're at the bottom?
- imh 10y agoOne in 10^24 seems like really easy odds to beat. Basically anything should happen more often than that, right? But if we choose a random 17 letters of the alphabet, the odds that they spell "probabilistically" is less than that. If we gave 17 letters to each of the 10^24 planets, we expect the word to happen on only one star (actually less than one). It's not too hard to argue that life is more difficult to get by random chance than the word "probabilistically." So before taking this article to mean that life is actually pretty likely, consider that an event having to occur at least one in 10^24 odds is actually extremely difficult for complex probabilistic phenomena. Who knows how likely life is, but we can't just assume it's higher than one in 10^24.
- guelo 10y agoYou're obviously coming down on the pessimistic side of the line but what's cool about this paper is that we now have a line in the sand to argue about!
- imh 10y agoI deliberately tried not to come off as pessimistic. I'd just seen a pop science article on this paper that went along the lines of "OMG, 10^-24? That's so small! Aliens are basically guaranteed!" It was totally exploiting people's lack of intution about numbers. I just felt the need to point out that 10^-24 is much more run-of-the-mill than it seems. The crazy thing is that probabilistic things are multiplicative, so it's all exponential. The difference between 10^-3 and 10^-4 is a single extra flip of a 10-sided die. The odds of life on a habitable planet might be 10^-10, it might be 10^-100, but you can be damned sure our uncertainty spans many orders of magnitude above and below 10^-24. (edit: I just looked up the pop article I was complaining about. It was in the new york times and the title was literally "Yes, There Have Been Aliens." Hence my crankiness.)
- hoodoof 10y agoThe universe is a really inconceivably big place. In fact they (the smart people) are not entirely sure that it isn't infinite. Drake equation or not, seems such a big place that it seems hard to imagine that this tiny little spot is in some way unique.
- millstone 10y agoYou can use this same argument to conclude that there's an alien race that speaks French. Of course we know they don't: as big as the universe is, the possibility space of possible languages is much bigger. French is only spoken on Earth, not because French is unique, but because it's not unique. But maybe, if everyone only spoke French, it wouldn't occur to us that other languages were even possible. We'd be trying to estimate how many French speaking aliens were out there. Deoxyribonucleic acid is our French. Because it's all we know, we think it's special. But the possibility space is much bigger.
- adrianN 10y agoPeople have been thinking about non-carbon based life, so not everyone is thinking only about French, at least not all the time.