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Probably. Assuming they're correct. Our planet is 12,742km in diameter, yet we've only drilled 12.262km deep [1] (and we were wrong about how hot it was gonna be), and sent a human down ~10.900km [2] (and we still can't decide how deep we've actually been). Do we really think we understand the probability of alien life on another planet that well, given the amount of data we have on those planets, and that we're cons…
Content of the article is pretty information, but worst clickbait title of the year. At the risk of alienating some fraction of HN community (no pun intended), I'm going to say this is what you get when trying to chase the likes of Gawker (again, no pun intended).
Science requires a theory and experimental validation.
The existence of aliens has been postulated by a crazy monk that also invented the concept of monads. It is much more metaphysics (religious thinking) than physics.
It strikes me as odd that most of flawed science is coming with the same flaws as religious thinking.
Probably. Assuming they're correct. Our planet is 12,742km in diameter, yet we've only drilled 12.262km deep [1] (and we were wrong about how hot it was gonna be), and sent a human down ~10.900km [2] (and we still can't decide how deep we've actually been). Do we really think we understand the probability of alien life on another planet that well, given the amount of data we have on those planets, and that we're cons…
You got the units of the borehole wrong, it's in meters not kilometers.
Could be confusing if you're used to the inverse comma/period from what we use in the US (comma=thousands, period=decimal).
> a probability for civilizations to form of one in 10 billion per planet was considered highly pessimistic I think people underestimate how low probabilities can really be. According to wiki the shortest self-replicating RNA is 165-bases long. Even if you convert all observable universe in RNA this is still not enough for this RNA to form by chance (4^165 is much larger than number of atoms in observable universe).
"There are more than 10^22 planets, therefore ETI probably exists[ed] if P(intelligent life|planet) > 10^-22".
Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a
civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in
10 billion trillion, then we are not the first. [...] In
other words, given what we now know about the number and
orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of
pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in
time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders
on the irrational.There have been aliens -- and they don't care about us. To assume that a collection of beings which have obtained the ability to travel amongst the stars would focus their attention on a single species on a single planet is fundamentally selfish. What resources does our earth contain that are not (more easily) obtainable elsewhere? If Drake's equation "holds", then what novelty do _we_ provide?
Us. If the probability of an intelligent species developing are that low that there might only be a handful of intelligent species in our galaxy then making contact with each of them is extremely interesting if they are as curious as we are.
The most likely reason that nobody seems to be out there is the great filter. The author asks if our civilisation will last millenia or millions of years - but I think a more apt scale would be decades or centuries. It just seems pretty obvious that we have an ever increasing set of opportunities to extinct ourselves, and therefore the probability of a civilisation ending disaster only grows. All the aliens either bl…