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
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wow this blew up way more than i expected. if anyone wants to dig into this more wrote a nice blog post with an FAQ, that includes links to the supplements mentioned in the main paper, and addresses the great filter:
aleph.se/andart2/space/
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i want to be clear that by "resolving the fermi paradox" i don't mean this paper definitely answers the question of whether we're alone in the universe, it in fact argues for tremendous uncertainty about that
the *paradox* is about why the drake equation spits out such a big #
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and the analysis in this paper IMO answers that question: it's because multiplying point estimates of numbers that are uncertain across multiple orders of magnitude ignores heavy tail behavior, and especially in this case ignores extreme uncertainty in P(intelligence | planet)
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the specific numbers in the paper are also mostly a proof of concept, the analysis i think ends up being pretty robust to fairly different distributions on the drake equation parameters, the broad qualitative picture involving a heavy tail remains
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