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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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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:

When we take account of realistic uncertainty, replacing point estimates by probability distributions that reflect current scientific understanding, we find no reason to be highly confident that the galaxy (or observable universe) contains other civilizations, and thus no longer find our observations in conflict with our prior probabilities. We found qualitatively similar results through two different methods: using the authors’ assessments of current scientific knowledge bearing on key parameters, and using the divergent estimates of these parameters in the astrobiology literature as a proxy for current scientific uncertainty.

When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable.

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.

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?

Renaissance Italy, maybe not (although we're making progress on our ability to detect even that). But "Renaissance Italy" is a tiny slice of time compared to the amount of time a civilisation could persist at Kardashev II (unless Late Filters are a thing, which seems like something we want to know about!), and K2 likely would be visible to us over much of the galaxy - Dyson Spheres are not stealthy and deploying them en-masse is even less so (antimatter rockets are also pretty obvious, although solar sails admittedly aren't).

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