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>When our uncertainty is properly accounted for in the model, we find a substantial a priori chance that there is no other intelligent life in our observable un

>When our uncertainty is properly accounted for in the model, we find a substantial a priori chance that there is no other intelligent life in our observable universe :(

avian 9y ago
But on the brighter side: > Conclusion 2: the great filter is likely in the past Is there an article to go with these slides? I'm somewhat competent with probability theory and I found it hard to follow with all the unmarked graphs and unexplained parameters.
- chicob 9y ago
  If you find one, can you please put the link here?
  - gjm11 9y ago
    My understanding is that the people behind this work are writing a paper on it, which when done will presumably make everything much more explicit than the slides do.
    - kaj_sotala 9y ago
      Yeah, their institute just put out a quarterly update a few days ago: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/quarterly-update-summer-2017/ https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/quarterly-update-summer-2017/ . It mentions their previous Fermi Paradox paper, "That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox" ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394 https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394 ), and also a "future paper" that sounds like this one: > Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and their co-author Milan Cirkovic published a paper outlining a potential strategy for advanced civilizations to postpone computation until the universe is much colder, and thereby producing up to a 10^30 multiplier of achievable computation. This might explain the Fermi paradox, although a future paper from FHI suggests there may be no paradox to explain.
- reubenswartz 9y ago
  I'd say "a great filter is likely in the past." There could be more than one...
  - worldsayshi 9y ago
    > The stars just don’t foretell our doom
  - DiThi 9y ago
    What's why it says it doesn't imply our safety. It's called _the_ great filter because affects pretty much any attempt of intelligent life, and not because it's the only one.
    - reubenswartz 9y ago
      I agree with what you're saying, I've just never liked the naming convention. ;-) There are probably lots of great filters that we've passed through already, and I imagine there are lots more "in front" of us, if we are good and lucky.
      - jerf 9y ago
        The reason it is called "the" great filter is similar to the sort of thinking that this PDF is attempting to debunk. If you optimistically assumed that the early Fermi terms are likely to be high, that therefore many civilizations must have gotten at least as far as ours, but there are still no aliens in the stars, then the logical conclusion is that there must be something standing between where we are now and galactic civilization, hence, the Great Filter. If on the other hand the early terms are much lower than expected, as this PDF is discussing, then the sum total of them could be considered the "Great Filter" and we could be past it. It's fine to just lump them together from our point of view, since at the moment we don't have the data to figure out which gate is "really" the determinative one. Wandering down my own thoughts here: The Copernican Principle, or perhaps better termed in modern parlance the Copernican Heuristic, that we are nothing particularly special, has had a good run. But it is just a heuristic, and one whose adherence has arguably been driven more by a science v. religion feud than logic or data, and whose underlying logic in the past 50ish years has metastasized into "Some religious people I don't like think Man is unique, they're wrong about everything, therefore Man is not unique in any way." But lately the Copernican Heuristic has been showing a lot of strain. Our solar system may not be unique, but it is increasingly looking like it may indeed be unusual, for instance. The Rare Earth arguments have never gone away and I think a lot of the dismissal of that idea has also come from "Religious people like the idea of the Rare Earth and some of them are arguing for it, religious people are wrong about everything, therefore Earth is not rare." [1], because scientifically they look as good as anything else on the subject (namely "those arguments seem to fit our lack of data as well as anything else", which is a pretty weak endorsement). And per the PDF under discussion, a lot of the universe really starts to make more sense when you start to seriously consider the possibility that, yes, we may in fact be very unusual, if not perhaps truly unique. [1]: Those are not the only arguments here, nor are they the best; I'm just saying that it is my subjective sense that the debate over the past few decades has often been very skewed by the underlying presence of this argument, even when not necessarily spoken. It is my perception that this debate has often been had under unspoken ground rules where all the discussion must occur in such a way as to ensure that the religious people are unable to point to anything as evidence for their side. It... doesn't make for the best conditions to do science under.
- dbdr 9y ago
  The unexplained parameters are the factors of the Drake equation: The number of civilizations, N, is assumed to be equal to the mathematical product of - the average rate of star formation, R∗, in our galaxy, - the fraction of formed stars, *fp*, that have planets, - for stars that have planets, the average number of planets *ne* that can potentially support life, - the fraction of those planets, *fl*, that actually develop life, - the fraction of planets bearing life on which intelligent, civilized life, *fi*, has developed, - the fraction of these civilizations that have developed communications, *fc*, i.e., technologies that release detectable signs into space, and - the length of time, *L*, over which such civilizations release detectable signals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
atemerev 9y ago
While Bayesian models are reasonably good in estimating such chances (and be dramatically reverted with new contradicting observations), they can't tell us the exact reason why such arrangement exists. Which is the core of Fermi paradox, and therefore it still stands.
- honestoHeminway 9y ago
  My personal guess is that complex live needs a long time to develop and also stable conditions during this long time- which basically rules out a lot of systems with sporadic, subtile deathbringers. That plus a vicious streak to evolution, allowing for developing of fast counter measures to any sentient species. (Any bird, carrying the plague, would have the world to itself.) might account for alot of the silence.
spookyuser 9y ago
After reading The Dark Forest last year I almost hope this is true.
Avshalom 9y ago
Note however they also say that there is only one intelligent species in the history of earth. Now lumpers v splitters aside there are plenty of tool using, problem solving, communicating species on the planet right now. And they cover the spread too: Octopuses, apes, birds; ants individually are of course dumb as a brick but colonies have actually invented agriculture. Yeah, ants probably will never make it into space and birds lack fine dexterity to build a rocket ship even if there is a parrot Newton/Ramanajun but that doesn't mean we won't find something to have a conversation with if we can go to them.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I think in this case "intelligent" is used as a shorthand for "capable of creating a technological civilization capable of colonizing the stars." Smart birds which can't build spaceships are intelligent the way we normally consider the word, but not "intelligent" for the purposes of the Fermi Paradox.
  - Avshalom 9y ago
    I mean it doesn't really matter because you just end up balancing one against the other but the wikipedia form of the drake equation and the slides form both use fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations) fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
  - iamcurious 9y ago
    >I think in this case "intelligent" is used as a shorthand for "capable of creating a technological civilization capable of colonizing the stars." Then humanity has a long way to go before proving its intelligence.
nabla9 9y ago
> • Note that this conclusion does not mean we are alone! Just that we should not be surprised if this is the case. This is a statement about knowledge and priors, not a measurement armchair astrobiology
sullyj3 9y ago
We'll just have to create it ourselves.
- wuch 9y ago
  Maybe we shouldn't? Thomas Metzinger on the ethical aspect of conscious AI: What would you say if someone came along and said, “Hey, we want to genetically engineer mentally retarded human infants! For reasons of scientific progress we need infants with certain cognitive and emotional deficits in order to study their postnatal psychological development - we urgently need some funding for this important and innovative kind of research!“ You would certainly think this was not only an absurd and appalling but also a dangerous idea. It would hopefully not pass any ethics committee in the democratic world. However, what today’s ethics committees don’t see is how the first machines satisfying a minimally sufficient set of constraints for conscious experience could be just like such mentally retarded infants. They would suffer from all kinds of functional and representational deficits too. But they would now also subjectively experience those deficits. In addition, they would have no political lobby - no representatives in any ethics committee. If they had a transparent world-model embedded in a virtual window of presence, then a reality would appear to them. They would be minimally conscious. If, as advanced robots, they even had a stable bodily self-model, then they could feel sensory pain as their own pain, including all the consequences resulting from bad human engineering. But particularly if their postbiotic PSM (phenomenal self-model) were actually anchored in biological hardware, things might be much worse. If they had an emotional self-model, then they could truly suffer - possibly even in degrees of intensity or qualitative richness that we as their creators cannot imagine, because it is entirely alien to us. If, in addition, they possessed a cognitive self-model, they could potentially not only conceive of their bizarre situation but also intellectually suffer from the fact that they never had anything like the “dignity” so important to their creators. They might be able to consciously represent the obvious fact that they are only second-rate subjects, used as exchangeable experimental tools by some other type of self-modeling system, which obviously doesn’t know what it is doing and which must have lost control of its own actions long ago. Can you imagine what it would be like to be such a mentally retarded phenomenal clone of the first generation? Alternatively, can you imagine what it would be like to “come to” as a more advanced artificial subject, only to discover that, although possessing a distinct sense of self, you are just a commodity, a scientific tool never created and certainly not to be treated as an end in itself?

>When our uncertainty is properly accounted for in the model, we find a substantial a priori chance that there is no other intelligent life in our observable universe :(

avian 9y ago

But on the brighter side: > Conclusion 2: the great filter is likely in the past Is there an article to go with these slides? I'm somewhat competent with probability theory and I found it hard to follow with all the unmarked graphs and unexplained parameters.

chicob 9y ago
If you find one, can you please put the link here?
- gjm11 9y ago
  My understanding is that the people behind this work are writing a paper on it, which when done will presumably make everything much more explicit than the slides do.
  - kaj_sotala 9y ago
    Yeah, their institute just put out a quarterly update a few days ago: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/quarterly-update-summer-2017/ https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/quarterly-update-summer-2017/ . It mentions their previous Fermi Paradox paper, "That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox" ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394 https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394 ), and also a "future paper" that sounds like this one: > Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and their co-author Milan Cirkovic published a paper outlining a potential strategy for advanced civilizations to postpone computation until the universe is much colder, and thereby producing up to a 10^30 multiplier of achievable computation. This might explain the Fermi paradox, although a future paper from FHI suggests there may be no paradox to explain.
reubenswartz 9y ago
I'd say "a great filter is likely in the past." There could be more than one...
- worldsayshi 9y ago
  > The stars just don’t foretell our doom
- DiThi 9y ago
  What's why it says it doesn't imply our safety. It's called _the_ great filter because affects pretty much any attempt of intelligent life, and not because it's the only one.
  - reubenswartz 9y ago
    I agree with what you're saying, I've just never liked the naming convention. ;-) There are probably lots of great filters that we've passed through already, and I imagine there are lots more "in front" of us, if we are good and lucky.
    - jerf 9y ago
      The reason it is called "the" great filter is similar to the sort of thinking that this PDF is attempting to debunk. If you optimistically assumed that the early Fermi terms are likely to be high, that therefore many civilizations must have gotten at least as far as ours, but there are still no aliens in the stars, then the logical conclusion is that there must be something standing between where we are now and galactic civilization, hence, the Great Filter. If on the other hand the early terms are much lower than expected, as this PDF is discussing, then the sum total of them could be considered the "Great Filter" and we could be past it. It's fine to just lump them together from our point of view, since at the moment we don't have the data to figure out which gate is "really" the determinative one. Wandering down my own thoughts here: The Copernican Principle, or perhaps better termed in modern parlance the Copernican Heuristic, that we are nothing particularly special, has had a good run. But it is just a heuristic, and one whose adherence has arguably been driven more by a science v. religion feud than logic or data, and whose underlying logic in the past 50ish years has metastasized into "Some religious people I don't like think Man is unique, they're wrong about everything, therefore Man is not unique in any way." But lately the Copernican Heuristic has been showing a lot of strain. Our solar system may not be unique, but it is increasingly looking like it may indeed be unusual, for instance. The Rare Earth arguments have never gone away and I think a lot of the dismissal of that idea has also come from "Religious people like the idea of the Rare Earth and some of them are arguing for it, religious people are wrong about everything, therefore Earth is not rare." [1], because scientifically they look as good as anything else on the subject (namely "those arguments seem to fit our lack of data as well as anything else", which is a pretty weak endorsement). And per the PDF under discussion, a lot of the universe really starts to make more sense when you start to seriously consider the possibility that, yes, we may in fact be very unusual, if not perhaps truly unique. [1]: Those are not the only arguments here, nor are they the best; I'm just saying that it is my subjective sense that the debate over the past few decades has often been very skewed by the underlying presence of this argument, even when not necessarily spoken. It is my perception that this debate has often been had under unspoken ground rules where all the discussion must occur in such a way as to ensure that the religious people are unable to point to anything as evidence for their side. It... doesn't make for the best conditions to do science under.
dbdr 9y ago
The unexplained parameters are the factors of the Drake equation: The number of civilizations, N, is assumed to be equal to the mathematical product of - the average rate of star formation, R∗, in our galaxy, - the fraction of formed stars, *fp*, that have planets, - for stars that have planets, the average number of planets *ne* that can potentially support life, - the fraction of those planets, *fl*, that actually develop life, - the fraction of planets bearing life on which intelligent, civilized life, *fi*, has developed, - the fraction of these civilizations that have developed communications, *fc*, i.e., technologies that release detectable signs into space, and - the length of time, *L*, over which such civilizations release detectable signals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

atemerev 9y ago

While Bayesian models are reasonably good in estimating such chances (and be dramatically reverted with new contradicting observations), they can't tell us the exact reason why such arrangement exists. Which is the core of Fermi paradox, and therefore it still stands.

honestoHeminway 9y ago
My personal guess is that complex live needs a long time to develop and also stable conditions during this long time- which basically rules out a lot of systems with sporadic, subtile deathbringers. That plus a vicious streak to evolution, allowing for developing of fast counter measures to any sentient species. (Any bird, carrying the plague, would have the world to itself.) might account for alot of the silence.

spookyuser 9y ago

After reading The Dark Forest last year I almost hope this is true.

Avshalom 9y ago

Note however they also say that there is only one intelligent species in the history of earth. Now lumpers v splitters aside there are plenty of tool using, problem solving, communicating species on the planet right now. And they cover the spread too: Octopuses, apes, birds; ants individually are of course dumb as a brick but colonies have actually invented agriculture. Yeah, ants probably will never make it into space and birds lack fine dexterity to build a rocket ship even if there is a parrot Newton/Ramanajun but that doesn't mean we won't find something to have a conversation with if we can go to them.

mikeash 9y ago
I think in this case "intelligent" is used as a shorthand for "capable of creating a technological civilization capable of colonizing the stars." Smart birds which can't build spaceships are intelligent the way we normally consider the word, but not "intelligent" for the purposes of the Fermi Paradox.
- Avshalom 9y ago
  I mean it doesn't really matter because you just end up balancing one against the other but the wikipedia form of the drake equation and the slides form both use fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations) fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
- iamcurious 9y ago
  >I think in this case "intelligent" is used as a shorthand for "capable of creating a technological civilization capable of colonizing the stars." Then humanity has a long way to go before proving its intelligence.

nabla9 9y ago

> • Note that this conclusion does not mean we are alone! Just that we should not be surprised if this is the case. This is a statement about knowledge and priors, not a measurement armchair astrobiology

sullyj3 9y ago

We'll just have to create it ourselves.

wuch 9y ago
Maybe we shouldn't? Thomas Metzinger on the ethical aspect of conscious AI: What would you say if someone came along and said, “Hey, we want to genetically engineer mentally retarded human infants! For reasons of scientific progress we need infants with certain cognitive and emotional deficits in order to study their postnatal psychological development - we urgently need some funding for this important and innovative kind of research!“ You would certainly think this was not only an absurd and appalling but also a dangerous idea. It would hopefully not pass any ethics committee in the democratic world. However, what today’s ethics committees don’t see is how the first machines satisfying a minimally sufficient set of constraints for conscious experience could be just like such mentally retarded infants. They would suffer from all kinds of functional and representational deficits too. But they would now also subjectively experience those deficits. In addition, they would have no political lobby - no representatives in any ethics committee. If they had a transparent world-model embedded in a virtual window of presence, then a reality would appear to them. They would be minimally conscious. If, as advanced robots, they even had a stable bodily self-model, then they could feel sensory pain as their own pain, including all the consequences resulting from bad human engineering. But particularly if their postbiotic PSM (phenomenal self-model) were actually anchored in biological hardware, things might be much worse. If they had an emotional self-model, then they could truly suffer - possibly even in degrees of intensity or qualitative richness that we as their creators cannot imagine, because it is entirely alien to us. If, in addition, they possessed a cognitive self-model, they could potentially not only conceive of their bizarre situation but also intellectually suffer from the fact that they never had anything like the “dignity” so important to their creators. They might be able to consciously represent the obvious fact that they are only second-rate subjects, used as exchangeable experimental tools by some other type of self-modeling system, which obviously doesn’t know what it is doing and which must have lost control of its own actions long ago. Can you imagine what it would be like to be such a mentally retarded phenomenal clone of the first generation? Alternatively, can you imagine what it would be like to “come to” as a more advanced artificial subject, only to discover that, although possessing a distinct sense of self, you are just a commodity, a scientific tool never created and certainly not to be treated as an end in itself?