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I consider the Fermi paradox nothing but a fun game. There are so many unknowns that we can literally say nothing about it. Nothing. We have no idea. We have a
by api 2y ago
I consider the Fermi paradox nothing but a fun game.
There are so many unknowns that we can literally say nothing about it. Nothing. We have no idea. We have a sample size of one and virtually nothing to even calibrate any of the scales for any of the parameters in any model. For all we know abiogenesis (life from non-living matter) is phenomenally rare to the point that there is an average of less than one example per galaxy per billion years. Or it could be common but complex life could be rare. Or, or, or, or... the or's become infinite because we have no information to constrain them. It's even worse than an endless theology argument since at least there you're arguing within a set of theoretical philosophical boundaries. This is literally unbounded.
We have only barely started to explore a tiny fraction of the vastness of the universe. It's far too early to make statements like these.
I do think exploring it is a fun way to enumerate all the possibilities for what we might or might not find out there, but it can at times get problematic. You have "longtermists" out there who actually cite the Fermi paradox in political, social, or ideological arguments, arguing for real world policies on the basis of an unconstrained untestable hypothesis.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoThe Drake equation works much better when you use probability distributions rather than point estimates.
- shermantanktop 2y agoCan you define “works” in this context?
- kelseyfrog 2y agoProduces probability distributions that aren't clearly extreme like 0 or 1billion.
- shermantanktop 2y agoRight, ok fair. The handling of intermediate distributions when combining factors is straightforward math but I have found it almost impossible to have a coherent conversation about that with many people, especially tech leaders. They want to talk about outcomes so they collapse all the intermediates into if/else decision trees and then get unhappy when the final probability doesn’t match their intuition. And these are smart people… I just think most people generally struggle with contingent probability. Do have links to this type of treatment of Drake?
- kelseyfrog 2y agohttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404 and discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17560462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17560462
- D-Coder 2y ago> There are so many unknowns that we can literally say nothing about it. Nothing. We have no idea. We have a sample size of one and virtually nothing to even calibrate any of the scales for any of the parameters in any model. You can't even prove to me that you exist. Yet we all seem to be able to agree on a lot of things. Re Fermi, we're pretty sure that gravity, physics, chemistry are the same throughout the universe. Biological forms did evolve on our planet, and our planet doesn't seem super-unusual. Given those things, we're pretty sure that there are planets with biological forms. Given that, I think we can say that there is a significant chance that other intelligent biological forms are out there somewhere. And then we get the Paradox.