7 ms·

Sorry, 'far from zero' is really meaningless and I shouldn't have said it that way. I don't actually mean to make a positive statement about the existence of c

by eof 16y ago

Sorry, 'far from zero' is really meaningless and I shouldn't have said it that way. I don't actually mean to make a positive statement about the existence of complex life elsewhere in the universe, though intuitively I think it's absurd to believe our little planet is the only one with life on it. I mean, why would we believe that other than residual religious dogma? Our understanding of n is not a constant.

jerf 16y ago
"I mean, why would we believe that other than residual religious dogma?" Because when we look out into the universe, it looks like we expect it to look when it is dead, not full of life, some significant percentage of which becomes intelligent. Nothing that looks like Dyson spheres of any form (recalling that the "solid shell" is actually only a special case), nothing that looks like curated stellar evolution (very high-end stuff but a truly advanced civilization will not want to leave stars just randomly flying around a galaxy and exploding), very very little that could even conceivably be a ship traveling between the stars (which turns out with any physically-plausible propulsion mechanism to be visible from a very long ways away and would show very clear blue/red shift changes), nothing that doesn't appear entirely natural. This isn't the whole story (maybe they're hiding, maybe our idea of the top end of tech is wrong, maybe they're all virtual, maybe they escaped into another, friendlier dimension, maybe they all kill themselves, maybe the universe is soaked with simple life but this article is essentially correct and complex intelligent life really is a 10^-1000 event, etc.), but it is not true that the claim that complex life must be hard is some sort of stupid idea in light of the size of the universe. Arguably it's actually the claim best supported by the evidence at this time. People are really bad at thinking about small probabilities even on the scale of one out of a million, and it's not impossible that complex intelligent life turns out to be one out of 10^1000 or worse; we simply don't know. It is not hard to come up with calculations that plausibly set the odds of advanced life occurring even once in the universe as less than 50/50 without having to make stuff up. Our ignorance dominates our knowledge here.
- eof 16y ago
  Where exactly would we be seeing all this stuff? I mean, how closely can we even look on planets in our galaxy? We are still discovering trillions of new galaxies here and there. Our reach is virtually zero in the context of the universe. It seems from our vantage point, I would expect the universe to look exactly the same whether it was bustling with life or we were the only ones. I had never thought about searching for Dyson spheres (it made me replay a part from The Big Lebowski where the dude says, "We'll that's fucking interesting man."), but they strike me as a incredibly hard thing to search for. Don't we see into the universe with the energy escaping from stars, galaxies, etc..? If some species were able to actually harvest the output of a star to anything approaching 100%, wouldn't it be exactly the type of thing we would never see? > Arguably it's actually the best claim supported by evidence Unless I am fundamentally wrong about the resolution of our map of the universe, I don't think there is any evidence either way unless you believe in any 'encounters'
  - jerf 16y ago
    "If some species were able to actually harvest the output of a star to anything approaching 100%, wouldn't it be exactly the type of thing we would never see?" You'd still have residual heat. Some have suggested that what we'd see is awfully similar to red giants though I rather expect we'd still see something odd about them. Besides, the one you really should have focused on is star-traversing ships. They're visible from a really long ways away. "I would expect the universe to look exactly the same whether it was bustling with life or we were the only ones." Allow me to re-add in the word "intelligent" to your "life". The universe looks the way it would be expected to work if absolutely nobody ever makes it off their planet to any reasonable degree, or there is no other intelligent life out there. Or we just happen to be the "precursors". Part of the problem with this debate is that most people are still participating in it with very 1960s ideas about the limits of technology, very Star Trek ideas about what technologically sophisticated aliens will be like. Of course the Federation could be floating around out there without us knowing, with its starships powered by magic, its technologies powered by magic, and humanoid aliens scattered about everywhere due to magic. (Yes, I know about the episode in question.) But that's not what it looks like. In reality, a modern conception of what a technologically-sophisticated culture would do results in a lot of things visible from a very great distance, the ones I previously mentioned before. And we see 0 of them. Personally I do not put much stock in the idea that intelligent life is abundant and easy and not a single one of them ever decides to go to another star. For such a society it just isn't that hard and the payoff of being the first in a star system is incomprehensibly enormous, well out of proportion to the difficulty of getting there. Something about standard story of easy, abundant intelligent life is very very wrong, and the most parsimonious explanation is that intelligent life is in fact not easy or abundant.
lotharbot 16y ago
> "intuitively I think it's absurd to believe our little planet is the only one with life on it." Intuition is often wrong, especially when it comes to probability. We have n planets, which we can rewrite as 10^x. There's a probability to evolve complex life of 10^-y on any given planet. Which is bigger, x or y? By how much? What are your error bounds? I've seen people throw out numbers with thirty zeros after them and think they've made a point, but really, either x or y could be much bigger than 30. There could be complex life on 10^many planets, or it could be a total fluke that it exists even on this one. Either way, your intuition isn't going to tell you anything meaningful.
- eof 16y ago
  hrm, I don't think that's true that there is nothing to be learned from our intuition on this. 10^-y could be anywhere from 0 to 1, but you have to be extremely close to 0 for y to be bigger than x. Since we are here pondering this, it makes intuitive sense that it's likely we 10^-y isn't infinitesimally close to zero.

by eof 16y ago

jerf 16y ago

"I mean, why would we believe that other than residual religious dogma?" Because when we look out into the universe, it looks like we expect it to look when it is dead, not full of life, some significant percentage of which becomes intelligent. Nothing that looks like Dyson spheres of any form (recalling that the "solid shell" is actually only a special case), nothing that looks like curated stellar evolution (very high-end stuff but a truly advanced civilization will not want to leave stars just randomly flying around a galaxy and exploding), very very little that could even conceivably be a ship traveling between the stars (which turns out with any physically-plausible propulsion mechanism to be visible from a very long ways away and would show very clear blue/red shift changes), nothing that doesn't appear entirely natural. This isn't the whole story (maybe they're hiding, maybe our idea of the top end of tech is wrong, maybe they're all virtual, maybe they escaped into another, friendlier dimension, maybe they all kill themselves, maybe the universe is soaked with simple life but this article is essentially correct and complex intelligent life really is a 10^-1000 event, etc.), but it is not true that the claim that complex life must be hard is some sort of stupid idea in light of the size of the universe. Arguably it's actually the claim best supported by the evidence at this time. People are really bad at thinking about small probabilities even on the scale of one out of a million, and it's not impossible that complex intelligent life turns out to be one out of 10^1000 or worse; we simply don't know. It is not hard to come up with calculations that plausibly set the odds of advanced life occurring even once in the universe as less than 50/50 without having to make stuff up. Our ignorance dominates our knowledge here.

eof 16y ago
Where exactly would we be seeing all this stuff? I mean, how closely can we even look on planets in our galaxy? We are still discovering trillions of new galaxies here and there. Our reach is virtually zero in the context of the universe. It seems from our vantage point, I would expect the universe to look exactly the same whether it was bustling with life or we were the only ones. I had never thought about searching for Dyson spheres (it made me replay a part from The Big Lebowski where the dude says, "We'll that's fucking interesting man."), but they strike me as a incredibly hard thing to search for. Don't we see into the universe with the energy escaping from stars, galaxies, etc..? If some species were able to actually harvest the output of a star to anything approaching 100%, wouldn't it be exactly the type of thing we would never see? > Arguably it's actually the best claim supported by evidence Unless I am fundamentally wrong about the resolution of our map of the universe, I don't think there is any evidence either way unless you believe in any 'encounters'
- jerf 16y ago
  "If some species were able to actually harvest the output of a star to anything approaching 100%, wouldn't it be exactly the type of thing we would never see?" You'd still have residual heat. Some have suggested that what we'd see is awfully similar to red giants though I rather expect we'd still see something odd about them. Besides, the one you really should have focused on is star-traversing ships. They're visible from a really long ways away. "I would expect the universe to look exactly the same whether it was bustling with life or we were the only ones." Allow me to re-add in the word "intelligent" to your "life". The universe looks the way it would be expected to work if absolutely nobody ever makes it off their planet to any reasonable degree, or there is no other intelligent life out there. Or we just happen to be the "precursors". Part of the problem with this debate is that most people are still participating in it with very 1960s ideas about the limits of technology, very Star Trek ideas about what technologically sophisticated aliens will be like. Of course the Federation could be floating around out there without us knowing, with its starships powered by magic, its technologies powered by magic, and humanoid aliens scattered about everywhere due to magic. (Yes, I know about the episode in question.) But that's not what it looks like. In reality, a modern conception of what a technologically-sophisticated culture would do results in a lot of things visible from a very great distance, the ones I previously mentioned before. And we see 0 of them. Personally I do not put much stock in the idea that intelligent life is abundant and easy and not a single one of them ever decides to go to another star. For such a society it just isn't that hard and the payoff of being the first in a star system is incomprehensibly enormous, well out of proportion to the difficulty of getting there. Something about standard story of easy, abundant intelligent life is very very wrong, and the most parsimonious explanation is that intelligent life is in fact not easy or abundant.

lotharbot 16y ago

> "intuitively I think it's absurd to believe our little planet is the only one with life on it." Intuition is often wrong, especially when it comes to probability. We have n planets, which we can rewrite as 10^x. There's a probability to evolve complex life of 10^-y on any given planet. Which is bigger, x or y? By how much? What are your error bounds? I've seen people throw out numbers with thirty zeros after them and think they've made a point, but really, either x or y could be much bigger than 30. There could be complex life on 10^many planets, or it could be a total fluke that it exists even on this one. Either way, your intuition isn't going to tell you anything meaningful.

eof 16y ago
hrm, I don't think that's true that there is nothing to be learned from our intuition on this. 10^-y could be anywhere from 0 to 1, but you have to be extremely close to 0 for y to be bigger than x. Since we are here pondering this, it makes intuitive sense that it's likely we 10^-y isn't infinitesimally close to zero.