[ared38]

> Why didn’t anyone think of this before?

Anyone that's read even the intro section of the Fermi paradox Wikipedia page already has: "There have been many attempts to explain the Fermi paradox ... suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial life is extremely rare". The paper just formalizes that by demonstrating we can arrive at low enough expected numbers of aliens (namely 0) with reasonable inputs to the drake equation.

> Imagine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 billion alien civilization. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth.

This occludes a lot more than it illuminates. Although the end section of the paper uses the bayesian inference Sniffnoy hinted at, the graphs SSC used (and his analysis of the papers results) come from the earlier section of the paper that still use the "chance of aliens per star" model. Even the bayesian part merely refines this probability based on observations; it's hardly "the wrong way to think about it" as SSC claims.