91–100 of 168 posts
If we're the most advanced civilization right now, that will be us in a few million years. We're kind of dicks.
I am surprised a more common argument was not mentioned: other life exists but the laws of physics limit our interaction. Maybe there is undiscovered physics like wormholes or time travel, or maybe there isn't and the speed of light really is a fundamental limit that cannot be surpassed. In that case, no matter how advanced another civilization becomes, they still can't violate natural law and are thus unable to reac…
The laws of any potential biology and the messiness of the world could together effectively limit a civilization's energy usage to much lower than indicated by the easily deducible laws of physic (the explicit laws of physics might limit the output of an internal combustion engine to a certain but the effective maximum winds up less than that. Human biological systems experience serious damage by being weightless for…
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The WAP accounts for high improbability by positing a multiverse, but (at least as I understand it) it doesn't predict high improbability, even if there is a multiverse. Also, in a multiverse scenario, the improbable thing might not be the formation of life, but the fine-tuning of the laws of physics which allows the formation of life. In which case life might be relatively common.
Also, in a multiverse scenario, the improbable thing might not be the formation of life, but the fine-tuning of the laws of physics which allows the formation of life. In which case life might be relatively common. If we assume that this tuning is not an all or nothing event then the larger the possible universe size the more likely it is that we lie within an region where the features are tuned just enough to let on…
It strikes me that the issue at play here is how one chooses to "sample" the anthropic principle, for want of a better term. When you say "pick a region at random", you assume a uniform probability distribution over the set of all universes supporting life (which incidentally is not possible if the number is infinite). But you don't say how to resolve the probabilities with universes containing multiple intelligent life forms - you do select randomly among those too? If so, shouldn't you rather be picking "randomly" from the set of all intelligent life forms in all universes in the first place?
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Also, in a multiverse scenario, the improbable thing might not be the formation of life, but the fine-tuning of the laws of physics which allows the formation of life. In which case life might be relatively common. If we assume that this tuning is not an all or nothing event then the larger the possible universe size the more likely it is that we lie within an region where the features are tuned just enough to let on…
You must factor in that such a region would contain a low percentage of the total number of civilizations intelligent enough to consider the question. A well-tuned universe would be teeming with life - it is therefore more likely that we find ourselves in such a universe (which was the point of the GP). You can think of it, not as a bullseye, but as a gaussian spot. It strikes me that the issue at play here is how on…
It may be possible in the future to estimate how well tuned a universe could be made for the appearance of intelligent life and also how large the surrounding non-tuned space could be. In the mean time we can only speculate :)
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Time delay. You're long dead before any profits return. How much current consumption are you willing to give for speculative distant future profit for others?
That depends on the average lifespan of the species in question, as well as the stability of their civilization. If you only live 100 years and your society will be unrecognizable after 500 years, it's obviously foolish to embark on a project that will turn a profit 1000 years later. If you can live 1M years and your civilization has been more or less stable for 10M years, you can probably afford to wait 10K years fo…
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This model assumes that interstellar travel is profitable. There is no evidence that this is the case, even if we had Star Trek technology. If it isn't profitable, then it turns into a drain on the home planet. That isn't sustainable.
Making money is one measure of profitability, another is reducing risk, something businesses aren't good at measuring. If there's two star systems instead of one colonized and the risk of one star system being wiped out by catastrophe is 1 in 1 million, then the risk of 2 being wiped out is only 1 in a quadrillion. A similar logic is behind why some people want to colonize the Moon or Mars. And when something has bee…
How about this possibility: the Great Filter is now! We entered it, perhaps, when we developed sufficient collective nuclear weapons capability to wipe out most or all human life; we won't be out of it until the major threats our civilization poses to the biosphere have been resolved.
At least they do in my optimistic viewpoint.
when the question is: "where are they?" and the answer is: "there is nobody here." then all long living civilisations must have left. so we should answer the question "why did they leave?"
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> My bias is that life is highly improbable and that we will not find any other life in our universe. It's probable enough for you to be writing this. The only options are 0, one and many. We can rule out '0'. That leaves us to decide whether the chances of us being the only one are larger than the chances that we are one of many. Obviously the second one has more chance of being true the one where there is only one.…
The point is that there are multiple universes, according to the quantum mechanics interpretation I subscribe to. So all of your options are true: 0, 1 and many. My position, which is admittedly no better than a guess, is that most universes by a far majority have 0. By virtue of me writing this, among other things, we live in a universe with at least 1. Again, my position would be that it is unlikely we have more th…
It basically states that the probability that "some" life exists is 1.
I'm not sure what the name of this next one is, but I believe it's a widely defended scientific principle that we're "typical" in some sense. This principle gets hard to justify cosmologically (it reduces to Occam's Razor locally), but it makes sense to me. It rejects very clearly some quirks like the Bolztmann Brain [2] argument.