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Is the Fermi Paradox Debunked?
A new paper is out(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404) concluding that the Drake equation is poorly designed and humans are most likely alone in the universe:
TDLR the Drake equation is wrong by dramatically overrating the probability of other intelligent life. We are more likely to be alone than we thought, and my take on this has been for a while that if life was common we'd have experimentally demonstrated abiogenesis by now. But this in turn debunks the great filter arguments people(mainly liberals) make about all sorts of pet issues- the great filter is already behind us.
I'm inclined to think that intelligent life is extremely common-- multiple species of humans coexisted in the past, and currently I would guess that at least one of [corvids, cetaceans, nonhuman great apes, cephalopods, LLMs in training runs] have members that are meaningfully sapient. However, the conditions for creating technological civilizations may be extremely rare and contingent-- and spacefaring technological civilizations even more so-- since maintaining a technological civilization is essentially a matter of outrunning evolution with new advances, and there's only so much physics/technology to discover. If you stagnate then diseases and other species have a chance to catch up, or individuals gain gene adaptations that benefit them at the cost of the society trying to harness them, or you simply run out of local resources/negentropy. It is essentially a geologic accident that the first wave of complex earth life was wiped out in a way that let the second flourishing eventually discover and make use of the plentiful hydrocarbons they left behind to grow society in exponentially more complex ways so quickly the rest of terrestrial life failed to adapt.
We "outran" evolution by several orders of magnitude, so I don't think building a technological civilization is a "race against time" in any real sense. Also, most of our civilizational development could have happened without hydrocarbons. Coal was definitely valuable to early civilizations, but charcoal would have sufficed, pre-industrial-revolution.
It's a little hard to point at specific human advantages and say they were essential for us to reach the modern age. Sure, our modern civilization was built almost entirely around hydrocarbons, but that only shows that they were the cheapest option we had, not that they were the only option we had. There's the classic question of whether superintelligent dolphins could ever conceivably make a technological civilization. My guess would be no, since they lack hands necessary for developing tools, easily accessible metals, and fire ... but who knows what alternatives 100,000 years of civilizational experimentation could come up with? It's difficult to prove a negative.
The industrial revolution itself needed everything to align, though.
Even the Romans experimented with steam power, and later on the Ottomans got a bit further (I wrote here about their automatic spit turner once), but nobody ever got anywhere.
Consider the situation in early modern Western Europe, and in Britain in particular.
Due to the ban on cousin marriage, Western Europe was detribalized and relatively individualist. This ended up enabling cooperation between unrelated strangers on the basis of contracts; the basis of modern capitalism.
There was very little slavery, and after the Black Death, a manpower shortage. In combination with the proto-capitalism, this encouraged the development and use of machinery. Mills (wind or water-powered) were everywhere, and put to many uses. We still refer to factories as mills sometimes, even in the metaphorical sense, such as in the term "puppy mill".
Europe was politically divided, and everyone was fighting each other. This caused an arms race where everyone was trying to make more powerful cannons. This spurred development of better metallurgy to make stronger cannons. The exact same development also gets you stronger boilers and cylinders.
Due to deforestation, Britain had run out of wood for heating. Britain also had abundant surface coal deposits. Coal was disliked because of the pollution you get from burning it, but it is for sure better than nothing, so they switched to coal out of necessity.
Then they ran out of surface coal too and started digging, but the mines filled up with water which had to be pumped out. At first this was done by horses. But Thomas Newcomen came up with a proto-steam engine. It wasn't that much better than the earlier attempts, but this one had an actual use case: it could pump the water out of the coal mines, and it could run on the coal dust that couldn't be sold, so it was basically free to run in the context of a coal mine, no matter how inefficient it was.
There now being a commercial use case, proper development of the steam engine commenced. Here's where the cannon metallurgy comes in: more pressure means more powerful engines. Neither the Romans nor the Ottomans could've managed that, for lack of metallurgy alone.
At the same time, the spinning jenny had been invented. At the same time as that, Britain was expanding its empire, and cotton from India was flowing in faster than it could be spun. At the same time as that, the flying shuttle had been invented, which meant the weavers were weaving so fast they were running out of yarn. All of this can be traced back to the "cooperation between unrelated strangers" bit. Turns out if you hook up a spinning jenny to a steam engine, you can make a whole lot of yarn. If you just so happen to have an oversupply of cotton and there just so happens to be a sudden large demand for yarn, this could make commercial sense.
Once you have a properly elaborated external combustion engine, the internal combustion engine is just a little development away.
Nothing else will really do. Windmills were perfectly adequate for milling grain. The bottleneck there was the farming. To improve the farming needs tractors. Steam tractors did exist but that's far into the refinement of the steam engine, you're not getting to that point from scratch. A small spinning jenny can be hand-cranked; and it can't really be wind-powered because the power delivery is not regular enough. And again the spinning jenny is constrained by its inputs which have to be farmed, unless you perhaps have a huge world-spanning empire that produces a lot. And before that you need to have a culture that's used to developing machinery, and a culture in which it's usual to work together and pool capital to set up businesses.
Everything happened to line up just so.
"Would Song China have industrialised if they hadn't been curbstomped by first the Jin and later Genghis Khan" is one of the great what-ifs of history. I am not a China expert, but based on schoolboy history they had high-trust commerce-supporting institutions (1), widespread use of water power (2), better metallurgy than the pre-industrial west (3), and underground coal mining (4).
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I generally agree with you that the industrial revolution was somewhat miraculous (and I appreciate all the historical detail!). I'm just not as certain that history couldn't have taken a slightly different path to the same endpoint - are you confident that each of your 8 steps are an inseparable part of the path to industrialization? Or, indeed, couldn't the same factors instead have aligned 3,000 years later, which would make zero difference to the Fermi Paradox?
There's a classic question of just how inevitable history is. There's Great man theory, which posits that it's highly dependent on the tiniest chaotic factors: the existence of particular individuals. On the other hand, a lot of innovations in math, science, and engineering were developed in multiple places simultaneously (calculus being one famous example), suggesting that technology might just progress in a somewhat straight line until certain advances "crystallize" out of it.
And at the timescales of the Drake Equation, you can't just argue that we were lucky to hit the industrial revolution quickly; you have to argue that, without X, we wouldn't have hit it in a million years (or however long it would take for a thriving medieval-level species to get wiped out by a global event). X = "cheap accessible hydrocarbons" does make for a reasonable hypothesis here.
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Hydrocarbons were necessary for the spacefaring part, though I concede not for the technological civilization part. I think dolphins probably have the raw intelligence to form a technological civilization, but that that, like most other animals (including humans for the majority of our evolutionary history!) are stuck in a local minima where they would need to develop multiple cultural adaptations at the same time to create technological civilization, but having only a subset of those changes carries reproductive penalties.
The fact that humans managed technological civilization was contingent on several lucky (or supernaturally determined....) factors like having an advantageous body plan, having extremely large, successful populations (think of how widespread hominids managed to be even before agriculture!) and the yoyoing between glacial maximas and minimas giving humans multiple chances to have explosive growth into empty niches. Those factors, plus probably any number of others I can't name, granted humanity slack necessary for local minima to be climbed out of-- and then a number of other fortuitous historical, biological, and geological factors let humanity keep outrunning stagnation and regression.
There's probably some point in human history or prehistory where human development of technological society becomes overdetermined (fire? Domestication of dogs? Agriculture? Trans-beringian colonization?) and a similar point for spacefaring society (rise of rome? Bureaucratic examinations in china? European wars of religion? Cortez's conquest of the aztecs?) But it's striking how late these things happen in the biological history of intelligent social creatures and societies respectively, and how inextricably linked to the human species' particular quirks. And without a base of comparison, we have no clue how much finetuning is in our blindspot. Maybe if neanderthals had conquered the world, slight differences in caloric requirements combined with agricultural surplus rations mean that empires have to be ten times the size to produce an equivalent amount of indolent philosophers and thereby develop an appreciable amount of math and engineering. Maybe if elephants had conquered the world, their more emotional, empathetic brains never require the creation of strict codes of laws, so their species instead traps itself in a crab bucket of social jockeying instead of allowing wide regions of coherent law where trade can prosper.
I agree that it's difficult to prove a negative, but as a heuristic I think it's fair to consider what proportion of global history has had spacefaring/technological society, and what proportion of intelligent species have managed to build the same. If we look at just humanity, society is 20k year old versus 100k years of behavioral modernity (or more!) so that's a rough 1/5 chance. If we extend to all of hominid history (~2 million years) now it looks more like 1/100. If we compare to the intelligent clades, with have maybe 2/6 clades (counting humans and LLMs against corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and elephants) and therefore maybe a 1/300 chance. Then compress to just the amount of time where we have space travel and we're looking at a 1/60,000 chance of getting a dominant intelligent species likely to develop space travel. And that's on earth, which lucky enough to not only have hydrocarbons, not only be small enough to enable chemical rockets, but also to have a massive nearby satellite that's useful for gravity assists and as an early destination of space travelers!
Obviously these numbers are extremely, extremely rough, but hopefully that my point is comprehensible-- that even if intelligent life is common throughout the universe intelligent spacefaring life is likely to be both rare AND wierd compared to other intelligent life.
If the Earth were too much bigger (or the atmosphere more dense), known chemical fuels wouldn't be sufficient to make it out of the gravity well. I'm not sure we'd be eager to use atomics for that even if it was the only real choice.
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Note that we don't use fossil fuels for "space travel" - the price point for that is well above the level where it's worth synthesizing better fuel. But I think your argument is fine if you just consider the industrial revolution instead, which was deeply dependent on cheap fossil fuels.
This is more of a quibble, but I don't think this is the right way to look at things at all. Suppose, hypothetically, that all intelligent species were guaranteed to produce a spacefaring civilization after some time, following the same exponential rate of improvement as us. Then for any level of technology you could always look back and say "gosh, it took us [X years] to get here and we've only had [technology] for [Y << X years] - the chances we would develop [technology] were minuscule!" When, in fact, the actual probability is 100%.
You really do just have to Do The Work and analyze all the specific factors you brought up. Intelligence level, temperament, access to resources, climate, lifespan, population size - in how many of these respects did we indeed "get lucky"? Also, did we manage to soldier on through despite certain disadvantages? What are the limits of the resourcefulness of an intelligent species determined to claw its way up the tech ladder? e.g. imagine some other civilization thinking "no way could we have reached the space age without our 1,000 year lifespans - trying to condense learning into 30-40 years would make scientific progress impossible!"
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