3 ms·

i don't follow what you're suggesting between 'other explanations' and 'assigning probabilities' - are you saying there are filters we haven't thought of, which

• greendestiny 17y ago
  "But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future" I think that statement is completely unfounded. We don't know how dead the space is, except that we haven't detected anything so far. The author goes on about us a single data point like that makes us incredibly rare, all it makes us is incredibly ill informed.
  • jeremyawon 17y ago
    I think that quotation by itself refers just to the Great Silence, and there seem to be two essential possibilities concerning this silence, both of which the author addresses: Either there is a sterilizing filter which lies ahead of planet bound species such as ours, preventing explosive colonization; Or, there is a psychological filter which "prevents" higher civilizations from making their existence visible - the author addresses this when discussing the Common Zoo hypothesis. Within a single galaxy you might entertain the possibility that we are just the first occurrence of intelligence to emerge. However: "Consider, for example, that the energy of a single star might power an intermittent very narrow-band signal detectable to pre-explosive life like ours across the entire universe [Gott 82]." So we would have to be a cosmically nascent intelligence. That makes the absence of both a biological and psychological filter exceedingly improbable.