The Drake Equation’s always been an exercise in multiplying a bunch of wild-ass guesses together and ignoring the error bars. At least this article pushes it out to ignoring the error bars on the error bars.
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
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Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
#32If we just stop for a moment and think how little we can “receive” from our surrounding (100 hundred light year max?) and how vast the universe, even our galaxy is and how incredible long the time span between the birth of the first stars and the birth of our petite civilization then we will realize we still can deduce nothing about the existence or non-existence of other civilizations.
What do you mean? Why can't we receive signals from more than "100 hundred light year" away?
I mean, we definitely can. We see stars that are thousands of lightyears away! However, maybe OP means "receive" as "response to a message we sent". This is indeed something we are able to do since ~100 years, so our communication bubble is currently ~100 lightyears.
Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
#33If we just stop for a moment and think how little we can “receive” from our surrounding (100 hundred light year max?) and how vast the universe, even our galaxy is and how incredible long the time span between the birth of the first stars and the birth of our petite civilization then we will realize we still can deduce nothing about the existence or non-existence of other civilizations.
What do you mean? Why can't we receive signals from more than "100 hundred light year" away?
Well, signals sent from Earth (radio, TV, etc...) are indistinguishable from noise at about that distance.
Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
#34If we just stop for a moment and think how little we can “receive” from our surrounding (100 hundred light year max?) and how vast the universe, even our galaxy is and how incredible long the time span between the birth of the first stars and the birth of our petite civilization then we will realize we still can deduce nothing about the existence or non-existence of other civilizations.
What do you mean? Why can't we receive signals from more than "100 hundred light year" away?
Because of the very large amounts of energy to transmit information in all directions from such a large distance. Also because it's such a stupid waste of energy. Why send radio waves out in all directions in order to communicate with a neighbor? Use a light beam instead.
So the lack of huge radio transmitters that we can detect really just means aliens aren't investing huge amounts of money into letting us know they exist. Why would they? Especially if they already know of other civilisations.
Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
#35The paper basically says that the Drake equation is just a guess, and if we’re going to guess, we might as well do so using probabilistic models. Their model puts the Great Filter behind us. This makes intuitive sense too — an early Great Filter simply has to stop life from occurring, while a late Great Filter has to deal with the complexity of preventing life from doing what it does best (surviving and spreading in…
I'm fairly confident the great filter is ahead of us. It won't be long (20-50yrs) until any hacker minded 14yr old can create a virulent virus in their bedroom and release it to the world when their girlfriend/boyfriend dumps them or just for the lulz. And that's just one of the many ways coming where any average person can decide to ruin the world. It's already possible today for a single rich person, if they wanted…
Given the project that Fermi is most associated with in the public mind, I am a little surprised that he found his paradox puzzling.
Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
#36The claim that we are alone in the observable universe seems incredibly arrogant. We don't have enough data for such an extraordinary claim.
Time and time again we have discovered that we are less special than we thought. Life appeared quickly after Earth was formed. I'm convinced the universe is teeming with life.
Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
#37The paper basically says that the Drake equation is just a guess, and if we’re going to guess, we might as well do so using probabilistic models. Their model puts the Great Filter behind us. This makes intuitive sense too — an early Great Filter simply has to stop life from occurring, while a late Great Filter has to deal with the complexity of preventing life from doing what it does best (surviving and spreading in…
It seems fairly obvious to me that the vast majority of civilisations will wire head themselves and disappear into virtual worlds of their own making. It takes a very rare soul to forsake eternal bliss and an eternal world of your own creation. Most civilisations will have just enough of a life support to keep the machines running. They might be spurred into action each time a sun burns out, but other than that why b…
I really like this idea, especially since it plays well with Simulation arguments. But unless there is some kind of inception-like time distortion occurring in a Simulations-all-the-way down scenario, then disappearing into virtual worlds is not eternal. Eventually every star will burn out.
I think that at least some people (and when you're dealing with galactic timescales and spaces, this means a lot of people) would stay in reality to figure out how to get around entropy and heat-death.
So even though we might very well be in a simulation of VR-checked-out civilizations (or even if we aren't), I would expect to see some people in our simulation/reality fighting against the parameters of the simulation/reality that puts a time-limit on existence.
Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
#38"When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable." Opinions like these (I stop one step short of calling them findings, as this is spe…
> I'm, too, more convinced by the Rare Earth hypothesis,
I think you are misinterpreting the conclusion of the paper. The conclusion is that there is "a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy". This extra probability is because of the extra uncertainty within our estimates of the parameters in the Drake equation. But "substantial probability" is something entirely different than being sure.
Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
#39The paper basically says that the Drake equation is just a guess, and if we’re going to guess, we might as well do so using probabilistic models. Their model puts the Great Filter behind us. This makes intuitive sense too — an early Great Filter simply has to stop life from occurring, while a late Great Filter has to deal with the complexity of preventing life from doing what it does best (surviving and spreading in…
It seems fairly obvious to me that the vast majority of civilisations will wire head themselves and disappear into virtual worlds of their own making. It takes a very rare soul to forsake eternal bliss and an eternal world of your own creation. Most civilisations will have just enough of a life support to keep the machines running. They might be spurred into action each time a sun burns out, but other than that why b…
You only need a single Elon Musk and a bit of tech infra slightly better than ours for a civilization to Von Neumann its local galaxy (and possibly its affectable universe).
Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
#40The paper basically says that the Drake equation is just a guess, and if we’re going to guess, we might as well do so using probabilistic models. Their model puts the Great Filter behind us. This makes intuitive sense too — an early Great Filter simply has to stop life from occurring, while a late Great Filter has to deal with the complexity of preventing life from doing what it does best (surviving and spreading in…
I'm fairly confident the great filter is ahead of us. It won't be long (20-50yrs) until any hacker minded 14yr old can create a virulent virus in their bedroom and release it to the world when their girlfriend/boyfriend dumps them or just for the lulz. And that's just one of the many ways coming where any average person can decide to ruin the world. It's already possible today for a single rich person, if they wanted…
To address your scenario concretely, though, technology advances generally – not just giving the power to destroy, but also giving the power to protect and restore. Covid and mRNA vaccines are a good example – globalization surely contributed to the pandemic, but the creation of the vaccine is also a product of globalization. If a single 14-year-old can create a virus, then thousands of 20-to-70-year-olds can create a vaccine even faster.
I might be wrong about this, but I think intelligence and benevolence are more strongly correlated than intelligence and malevolence, and that as the world becomes more educated, it is also becoming more intelligent and more benevolent. An evil-genius is a trope because it is an anomaly. For every evil-genius there are thousands if not millions of good-geniuses. Evil tends to look like Hitler and Stalin, not Einstein and Turing.
It won't be a 14-year-old that brings the world to its knees. It will be old men (and women, I suppose) spewing hate and lies from their Oval Offices.