Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Pazzaz 1963 days ago
An interesting paper that I don't see brought up often enough is "Dissolving the Fermi Paradox" by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord[0]. They show that it isn't a surprise that we are alone in the universe if we consider the uncertainty inherent to parameters of the Drake equation. Their analysis estimate that there is (at least) a 39% chance that we are alone in the observable universe.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
2 comments
thesteamboat 1963 days ago
From a previous discussion of this paper I took away the following clarifying insight:

The Drake equation is usually turned into the Fermi paradox via some estimations that show the average (mean) number of alien civilizations we expect to see is large (>1).

However, just because the mean is large does not imply that seeing 0 is low probability.

More concretely, suppose there were 10 possible 'parallel' universes. In 9 of them humanity is alone and in the tenth there are tens of millions of alien civilizations. The probability of appearing to be alone is 90% even though the number of alien civilizations we'd expect to see is in the millions.

link
krapp 1963 days ago
You don't even need to invoke parallel universes. Look at the Hubble Deep Field photo[0]. Our observable universe has hundreds of millions of galaxies. It's entirely feasible for tens of millions of alien civilizations to be spread about and not visible to us in the narrow window of space and time in which we've been looking.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field

link
thesteamboat 1963 days ago
Invoking parallel universes was solely for ease of explaining/emphasizing the math, not because I think it's a realistic model.

Talking about the Hubble Deep Field kind of misses the point. The original Drake equation[0] estimates the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy. I probably should have used galaxies in my example, but left it with parallel universes as that is the common phrase.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

link
saberdancer 1963 days ago
I really dislike these type of papers. Just like Drake equation, it is all guesswork with completely unknown boundaries for many of the parameters.

How will their paper work if we confirm life on Venus, especially if it independently evolved.

link