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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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