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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.
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.
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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