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> but it is actually reasonable to put ballpark numbers on the probability Not if those "ballpark numbers" are just gut instinct dressed up in order to appear
by p-e-w 4y ago
> but it is actually reasonable to put ballpark numbers on the probability
Not if those "ballpark numbers" are just gut instinct dressed up in order to appear more credible than a simple "uhhm, maybe?".
> is it even possible to simulate reality to the fidelity that we seem to observe around ourselves?
Nobody knows the answer, and nobody knows a realistic path to finding the answer in the near or medium future. Any claims to the contrary are just extrapolations from the knowledge and technologies available to us, which are utterly insufficient to cope with problems anywhere near that magnitude.
> Would you say that it's also pointless to try to estimate the probability that there is intelligent life on other planets?
Yes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that concepts such as the Drake equation are bordering on pseudoscience. The "science" angle simply doesn't add anything of value here. The Drake equation says little more than "probabilities can be chained by multiplication", which again is just a complicated way of stating an intuitive fact. Without estimates for the key factors (such as the probability that life develops into intelligent life), the equation doesn't provide any actual insight, whereas once those probabilities are known, the equation becomes trivially obvious.
I believe that the simple statement "we have no idea whether intelligent life exists outside the solar system" is not only obviously correct, but shows a deeper understanding of the problem than the Drake equation does. Recognizing when no actual knowledge is available can be a profound insight – far more profound than believing you have made progress because you've split the question into smaller questions.
- kelnos 4y agoI think you're trying to suggest that some ideas are mutually exclusive when they're not. There is nothing inconsistent about saying both "we have no idea whether intelligent life exists in the universe" and "based on the information we have today, and some rubric I came up with, I believe there may be an X% chance that there is other intelligent life in the universe". These are not opposing views, and no cognitive dissonance is required to sincerely hold both of them in one's mind. The Drake Equation isn't "science"; your argument that it is pseudoscience is just not even applicable or pertinent. Science is merely making hypotheses, testing them, and using the results to develop frameworks that allow us to explain and make predictions about the universe around us. The Drake Equation is obviously not that; it's a thought experiment, a conjecture, a means of attempting to assign weight to various possibilities. The equation itself is not a result of science that has been done, but we can certainly use scientific knowledge to plug numbers into it. Along those lines, we might do science in order to have better numbers to plug into the Drake Equation (consider that we already can do that, by using the past couple decades of exoplanet research). That doesn't, of course, mean that the Drake Equation is correct, or that it assigns the proper weights to various conditions, or even includes conditions that actually matter. I don't think anyone credible would claim that the Drake Equation (or anything else that claims to do something similar) is the authority on the intelligent life question. It's just an imprecise starting point that some people (clearly not you, but that's fine!) find interesting, and in my view, it actually helps illustrate how little we know.