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What does novelty have to do with dissolving the Fermi Paradox? Is Fermi is some well established science, with repeated experimental proof, upon which numerou
by true_religion 8y ago
What does novelty have to do with dissolving the Fermi Paradox?
Is Fermi is some well established science, with repeated experimental proof, upon which numerous other conjectures have been built on?
Does it really require a novel approach to attack its basis?
- jessriedel 8y agoThe top-level commenter wrote > Everyone considered this option. From the very first day the paradox was posed. We don't know the parameters well, it's within our margin of error that no one else is out there, so it's an option. And the person I replied to was rebutting this point (that the approach is obvious and considered long ago). It's fine to write review articles, or clean up old arguments and repackage them, but it shouldn't be presented as a new idea, and in particular it should point to the prior work.
- titzer 8y agoI don't think they are claiming to have invented math on probability distributions and I didn't mean to suggest that that is what is novel about this paper. They used a different, more powerful technique to look at the math of the Fermi Paradox and came to a conclusion different than that following from the normal treatment of the Drake equation. That's a reasonable contribution, IMO.
- jessriedel 8y agoBut if you just formalize an approach that was considered by everyone right from the start, this isn't coming to a different conclusion. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17304389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17304389)