[anotheryou]

I can't wrap my head around the "we should expect to be in a large group".

We, as a single species, found to the question "is there alien life besides us?". I'm no individual independent from the culture of our species. I don't come up with this question randomly, you pointed me to this today.

The other way around: I have to expect to be in the large group only, if the large group makes it more likely that someone in it has questions about his group (more members -> more random thoughts -> greater total of thoughts about which group one is in). This is true for blood types (unless people with weird blood types commonly get in to issues making them wonder about their blood type...). But for aliens, probably either more or less all wonder collectively through cultural exchange, or it wasn't part of a public debate.

Hm, you get the knot in my brain? can you solve it?

[phreeza]

I do get the knot. My gut feeling would be that the definition of an individual in this case is "an entity that is capable of independent thought". So if all our thoughts as a species were perfectly in sync (borg-style), we would count as a species of population 1. Because of cultural exchange, one would probably have to count us as a species of effective size less than that of the actual population size.