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>This was a very formative paper for me. If correct—and it certainly seems correct to me—then it completely dissolves the Fermi paradox. Could you please expla

• adastra22 3y ago
  The paper shows that when multiplying seven unknown numbers together, the expected result is much, much less than multiplying seven fixed estimates together. Sagan et al come up with a long sequence of reasonable sounding estimates that when multiplied together result in, say, N=10000, that is ten thousand advanced civilizations in our own galaxy alone. But each one of the terms involved in that calculation was highly uncertain. This paper shows that if you multiply the probability distribution for N_a and N_b together and then sample, you get a value less than sampling N_a and N_b separately and then multiplying, as Drake, Sagan, et al do. If you perform the calculation properly using their very same estimated terms, but multiplying probability distributions instead of pre-sampling, you end up with an aggregate N value very close to 1. Meaning we should expect to be alone, and therefore no paradox.