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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 sure I'm not the first person to make this argument, but if the Great Filter is ahead of us, we're in deep trouble. It's not a problem that's going to be solved by cutting carbon emissions or pausing AI development for 6 months or implementing a worldwide North Korea style police state. It's something that's wiped out every last one of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other intelligent species, including species which were well aware that they potentially faced a Great Filter.
Distance. Distance is the great filter. Both K2 and K3 civilizations require new physics. And there is scant reason to believe that there exist one. if we are stuck with the absurdly low speed of causality of 300000km/s the universe may be full to the gills with life and we won't be able to detect it.
Can we agree that in this scenario, we are probably alone in the Milky Way?
No, as i said in my own reply, if there were a civilization comparable in sophistication to Renaissance Italy 150 light years away from us right now how would we even know? Its not like we're going to pick up their radio signals.
I would go with the basic Fermi argument on this. If development of intelligent life is so likely as to produce intelligent civilizations that close to use in space and time, then almost certainly there would have been either Von Neuman probes or a colonization wave (from other intelligent civilizations) passing through our solar system hundreds of millions of years ago. And we don't see these things.
So we wouldn't specifically detect the hypothetical civilization you propose, but we can be pretty confident that it's not there.
But how would we know if a probe had come and mined a bunch of asteroids (or sucked Mars dry, or something) some millions of years ago, then moved on?
Well there are two motivations why extraterrestrials might leave unmistakable evidence:
First, they might want to leave a message for the sake of connecting with any intelligent species that might arise. (This would be trivially inexpensive to do and it's certainly something we humans have attempted to do.)
Second, there's a lot of free energy and resources lying around in our solar system. Why leave that on the table?
For the sake of discussion, let's say that an extraterrestrial species is "Unobtrusive" if for whatever reason it leaves no messages and leaves our solar system largely intact.
Ok, if the likelihood of intelligent life developing is high enough that likely to produce a Renaissance Italy level civilization 150 light years away, it follows that (probably) there have been thousands if not millions of intelligent extra-terrestrial species who have had the opportunity to send a probe and/or a colonization wave through our solar system. And it seems highly unlikely that every last one of them would have been Unobtrusive.
If...
The thing is that all of this stuff depends on exactly which values you wanna plug into the Drake equation -- any options between "we are alone" and "spacefaring intelligent life is pretty rare but not that rare" seem on the table based on what we can observe.
The assumption that Von Neumann probes would necessarily/likely be maximally grabby paperclip maximizers does seem like reasoning from sci-fi to me -- like, would you design a system that just goes around raping every star system it encounters? Why would the aliens?
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