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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've always found the "Fermi Paradox" and "Great Filter" to be kind of dumb for the same reason as @magicalkittycat. Fermi's leap from "there is at least one planetary system that supports life" (Earth) to "life is more likely to exist than not" is completely unsupported by logic or observation. Fact is that we have no idea what the base rate for any of the terms in the Drake Equation actually are.
If we posit that are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and of those stars 1 in 10,000 produces a planet with advanced multi-cellular life, and of those planets 1 in 10,000 produces a technological civilization, that works out to there being around 1,000 civilizations in our galaxy ranging in complexity from stone-age hunter-gathers constructing stone circles to Type II on Kardashev scale constructing Dyson Spheres. Given the shear size of the Milky Way (Hat Tip to Douglas Adams) I feel like the odds that 2 of us would be situated close enough to detect one another would be rather low. For example, if there were a civilization comparable in sophistication to Renaissance Italy 150 light years away from us, right now, how would we even know? It's not like we're going to be picking up their radio transmissions.
That's largely been my feeling on the Fermi 'paradox'.
Or, well, I have two feelings on it.
The first is that I'm annoyed that people call it a paradox. It's not a paradox. It's at most a question, or a mystery. A paradox has to involve a contradiction of some kind. An observation that seems odd is not a paradox.
But that's just pedantry. My second feeling is that it just seems pointless, to me? We don't have enough data to plausibly speculate as the prevalence of life in the galaxy, or the prevalence of advanced technological life, or any kind of life that might be visible to human civilisation from Earth. The answer to, "Why haven't we seen evidence of extraterrestrial life?" is "We don't know, and we don't have enough information to do anything more than speculate".
Armchair speculation can be fun. Maybe life is very rare, so it's just that we're the only one out there. Maybe life is more common than that but we just happen to the first one off the mark. Maybe there's some sort of 'Great Filter'; technological civilisations destroy themselves, or all lose themselves in virtual worlds, or for some reason don't leave traces of their presence. Maybe extraterrestrial civilisation deliberately conceals itself. Maybe we're some sort of technological outlier and we don't know how to look. There are just too many possible options and with a sample of exactly one, Earth itself, we can't calculate any plausible probabilities.
I just don't think there's a paradox or even a particular puzzle here. Thus far we have not seen any signs of extraterrestrial civilisations. That's not a paradox. That's just an observation that we don't yet know the explanation for.
I think the contradiction is meant to be the observations themselves, and the way they point in opposite directions when what naively seems like the same Bayesian-type heuristic is applied to each - "life exists on our planet, therefore aliens are likely" and "we've never met any aliens, therefore aliens are unlikely". That's at least defensible as a like-to-like contradiction, though I agree calling it a paradox is a bit of a stretch, motivated by "the Fermi Paradox" sounding cooler than any of the more cautious alternatives.
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