3 ms·

If you calculate and come up with the answer that it's really likely we should be seeing life, is it more likely that life is hiding or that one of your assumpt

If you calculate and come up with the answer that it's really likely we should be seeing life, is it more likely that life is hiding or that one of your assumptions is wrong? Maybe try adding confidence levels to your estimates or changing them to ranges? It might be that von Neumann probes are harder to make or slower than you're expecting. If you're really confident in all the values then your conclusion still makes sense. There's other factors that contribute to not seeing life in the universe. We have extremely limited ability to obverse exoplanets, my understanding is an exoplanet we're looking at could have life and we wouldn't know it. I think we're best suited to detecting life that outputs recognizable radio signals in our direction, which should be rare among all life.

asdff 3y ago
It's probably extremely likely that if there are other intelligent life out there it is hiding. Risks of things like contamination and extermination are massive, and one need only to look at our own history. Transoceanic trade was havoc enough on our own species when it emerged a few centuries ago, both in terms of loss of human life from violence and disease as well as native flora and fauna that was either exploited, cut out in favor of a cash crop, or outcompeted by an invasive species that came aboard those ships. Even today you can't do things like transport firewood due to the risk of spreading disease to different populations. I think we are in an especially dangerous position since we are just blaring out "Look at me!!!" with our radio emissions into the universe. Hopefully another species doesn't consider this as some brutish chesthumping of our confidence against conquest.