If aliens existed we could readily see copious surface engineering in galaxies: "The germs of existence [on] earth if they could freely develop themselves would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years"(Malthus) https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html … https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2012/01/23/rethinking-setis-targets/comment-page-1/ …
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What, in your opinion, is the best explanation for the paradox?
Many early events in the origins and early history of life are astronomically improbable. e.g. copious handwaving still required to try to describe how nature could go from comet stuff to even the simplest autocatalytic set of nucleic acids, not to mention ATP, proteins, ...
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By contrast, there are no known highly probable existential risks (e.g. large-scale nuclear war is neither highly probable nor if it happened an actual existential risk to our species), so "the Great Filter is ahead of us" is an explanation of vastly lower probability.
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Interesting. I see large scale nuclear war in the future as highly probable. Why do you think not? Isn't there a "Moore's Law of destructive technology"--cost of violence greatly decreasing year after year?
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To make a difference in this discussion it has to be 99.9999999999% or more probable, give or take a few 9s.
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Got it
End of conversation
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I’ve always thought this. Possible the odds of a self replicator spontaneously organizing itself out of primordial soup are so tiny that the odds of it happening in the whole life of the universe are, say, 50/50. Not only might we be alone, we might be lucky to be here at all.
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That's essentially the "rare Earth" hypothesis of Ward and Brownlee... which has time and again been falsified by recent astrobiological research.
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