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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That summary of it is completely wrong.
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care to elaborate? i admit that “completely resolved” is hyperbolic but i agree with the authors that much of the “paradox” is not particularly paradoxical anymore
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We always knew that it could be "resolved" by postulating strong enough early filter steps. Many of us have also known that you add logs when you multiply numbers.
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right, okay, so those are two quite different issues. the second point i think is nowhere to be found in most discussions of the fermi paradox so at least there's a science communication / exposition problem here. as to the first point i guess you take issue with the authors...
...claiming that it's reasonable to model the uncertainty in the early filter over 200 orders of magnitude? would you argue for a narrower window?
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I've made no claims about that window. As I said, its long been known that you can "solve" this if you postulate very big initial filters. The difficulty is to offer concrete arguments as to why they should be so big. That is a plausible claim, but still far from obvious.
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The Fermi literature is too small to expect it to explicitly mention all common math facts.
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Isn't it simpler to infer that multi-generational, inter-stellar travel is, if not impossible, extremely unlikely? What am I missing?
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