it's ludicrous how few people know about this paper, so, friendly reminder that the fermi paradox was completely resolved in 2018 and it turned out to be because multiplying point estimates of highly uncertain parameters is very bad actually
arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
Conversation
I was aware of this! but I now feel some pretty gnarly fear thinking about the Fermi paradox or anything related because of Bostrom's "Where Are They"... have you read it?
nickbostrom.com/extraterrestri
2
14
i think the sandberg-drexler-ord paper's analysis roughly implies that the great filter is most likely to be abiogenesis although i don't think they exactly say that so i'd have to think about it to be confident
Replying to
I hadn't come across the idea of The Filter when I read this paper, so I didn't even think about it at the time. I trust your gut 😅
1
So finding microbial life in the clouds of Venus or elsewhere would throw a huge wrench in this. It often offered that Eukaryotes and the Cambrian explosion offer a filter. All we know is we can’t see Dyson swarms, that’s it.
1
2
This Tweet is from a suspended account. Learn more
Show replies
We end up thinking it is either mostly abiogenesis or complex life. Both are surprisingly able to "buffer" the great filter - I would not tremble in my boots if there was Venusian or Martian simple life. See the appendix of the paper.
1
3
31
I would get more nervous if we found a fossil Martian cockroach, though. If life due to local panspermia maybe less worrying, but I suspect that if there was interplanetary life spread then there would be interstellar spread too.
1
19
Show replies