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This is too facile. The Copernican principle assumes that we are not in a spatially or temporally privileged position, and there are no obvious hard steps -- t
by A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
This is too facile. The Copernican principle assumes that we are not in a spatially or temporally privileged position, and there are no obvious hard steps -- to say nothing of 24. It's frankly bizarre to go from there to "we are unique among 10^22 stars."
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoHaving thoughts around how many stars are in the observable universe is a very reasonable starting point. Even without a privileged position the observable universe is still well defined in an expanding universe - at some boundary other stars are moving away too fast to be observed. So we can absolutely state this.
- DennisP 2y agoIn this case the Copernican principle is at odds with the anthropic principle. If there were only one place in the universe with intelligent life, then necessarily that's where we would be. GP may be thinking of this paper, which uses a reasonable probability distribution for each parameter in the Drake equation, and finds a decent chance that there is no other technological civilization in the observable universe: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
- jovial_cavalier 2y agoInvocations of the anthropic principle come with more baggage than may be realized. And I suppose, by extension, the Copernican principle too. https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec17.html https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec17.html
- DennisP 2y agoSome people take it way too far, but I think my invocation was just trivially true. We can't come to any conclusion about the prevalence of life elsewhere in the universe, just based on the fact that we exist.