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The Big Alien Theory

136 points by miralabs 10y ago

tronje 10y ago
Please, for all our eyes' sake, change the color of the font to something darker! Light-grey on white is just terrible.
- fergussimpson 10y ago
  Thanks, I've fixed it now!
  - tronje 10y ago
    Thank you! I didn't mean to come across as overly critical, but I really think it is a much nicer reading experience now. Very cool that you considered my criticism :)
andrewclunn 10y ago
Wrong. We have no notion if we are more or less populas than other species, so we should assome that we are one of the many smaller (in number) by virtue of that being the more common, thus drawing the exact opposite conclusions.
- deciplex 10y ago
  That's what we should expect to see when looking for other planets with intelligent life. But you, andrewclunn, should expect to live among one of the more populous species.
  - andrewclunn 10y ago
    That's the point, from the individual's perspective the correct prediction is completely contrary to that from the species' perspective based on this approach.
    - deciplex 10y ago
      Right. So you, the individual reading the article and posting on HN, should expect to live among one of the more populous species of life in the universe. e: Maybe you are implicitly assuming that the workflow for "determining" who you are born as goes: 1. pick a random species 2. pick a random individual in that species. But it's more like: 1. pick a random individual.
anotheryou 10y ago
I can't wrap my head around the "we should expect to be in a large group". We, as a single species, found to the question "is there alien life besides us?". I'm no individual independent from the culture of our species. I don't come up with this question randomly, you pointed me to this today. The other way around: I have to expect to be in the large group only, if the large group makes it more likely that someone in it has questions about his group (more members -> more random thoughts -> greater total of thoughts about which group one is in). This is true for blood types (unless people with weird blood types commonly get in to issues making them wonder about their blood type...). But for aliens, probably either more or less all wonder collectively through cultural exchange, or it wasn't part of a public debate. Hm, you get the knot in my brain? can you solve it?
- phreeza 10y ago
  I do get the knot. My gut feeling would be that the definition of an individual in this case is "an entity that is capable of independent thought". So if all our thoughts as a species were perfectly in sync (borg-style), we would count as a species of population 1. Because of cultural exchange, one would probably have to count us as a species of effective size less than that of the actual population size.
marcus_holmes 10y ago
I don't get the stats here: - I am an ordinary sentient being (for the sake of argument... just nod) - I am a member of an ordinary species. according this theory one of these statements is wrong.
- deciplex 10y ago
  According the reasoning here it's the second one that's wrong (or rather, unlikely). btw fergussimpson your posts are showing up dead but then are getting undeaded after a certain period of time I guess. Your first post here was dead for a while and now it isn't. Your reply to this parent is dead as of writing this post. I guess it's because you have a new account - I wasn't aware we were auto-hellbanning people now, though. How annoying.
  - fergussimpson 10y ago
    Hmm that's unfortunate. How do I become un-dead?!
    - arjie 10y ago
      What's likely happening is someone's vouching for your comments. I did that for your other one. You should rapidly become considered a normal user, but I'm told emailing HN is what you do if you continue to be auto marked dead.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
        How do you vouch for someone? I can't see an option - is it like flagging?
        DanBC 10y ago
        Click the time stamp of the comment and the vouch link should show. You need a karma level of 30 for the flag / vouch links to appear. You need to have showdead turned on to see the comments that have been flagged. Here are two comments from dang about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478886#up_10480270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478886#up_10480270
zby 10y ago
So they do something like this: Let's choose a human in random - he is more probable to be from Pakistan than from Slovakia. (OK) Now let's choose a country - now an average country like Slovakia is more probable than a country as big as Pakistan. (OK) So if you are a human - then it is most probable that you live in a country that is more populous than the typical country. (OK) Now they say - ok - so now instead of choosing humans let's do the same thing with sentient beings. If you are a sentient being it is more probable that you live on a planet where there are many other sentient beings rather than on a planet that there are few of them. But if you go to some random planet with sentient life - then the expected number of sentient beings there would be average. Then it goes on that "Physically larger species will on average have lower population densities." - so most probably the random alien planet will have fewer and larger sentient beings than us. I don't know if I buy that whole argument - but I am too lazy to write the bayesian equations to nail it down.
- wrsh07 10y ago
  If you want the math, that's here: http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org/content/456/1/L59 http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org/content/456/1/L59
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- leblancfg 10y ago
  My only gripe is that he's only used vertebrates in his dataset (based on http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078733 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....). It's "only human" to include close members on the phylogenetic tree, but I see it as a flaw. What if our imaginary aliens are plant-like, squid-like, or something we can't even begin to fathom, like symbiotic unicellulars? Sentient, self-replicating machine clusters the size of planets? Take a minute to think about this. I think his conclusion should then have been worded like: the random alien planet will have fewer and larger VERTEBRATES than us. And that's a probably very meaningless conclusion. I'm not saying his intuition is wrong, though. In fact I quite like it. But in this scenario, I don't think "whatever remains, however unlikely" lifeforms can even begin to be imagined by our tiny little human brains.
garbage_stain 10y ago
"Not even wrong". This entire analysis is built on reasonable statistics which are predicated on dubious and unprovable assumptions, which invalidate the entire thing. Consider "the size of alien species". Okay... so we are extrapolating about the size of beings we know nothing about based on those beings that have come to existence in our particular situation? Assuming that the distribution of weight across animals on Earth is the same as the distribution of weight across beings in the universe is dubious. This is a wonderful example of Brandolini's law.
- jak1192 10y ago
  That is not an example of Brandolini's law. It took a whole website to spew the bullshit but only 3 or so sentences for you to refute it.
  - klue07 10y ago
    garbage_stain is only refuting a very small part of the entire website. Imagine the amount of effort to properly refute the entire website addressing each BS point.
- api 10y ago
  The simple fact is that we have one example of a biosphere: Earth. You can't say much of anything meaningful from a sample size of one. We have no idea what aliens could be like, how many there might be, etc. until we either go find some or some (or their signals) come here.
  - indrax 10y ago
    What will discovering one alien race tell us about other aliens? Can we predict anything about the next unknown species discovered on earth?
    - api 10y ago
      If we discovered other aliens we'd have a sample size of two at least, which would enable us to say something a little more meaningful about the distribution of life in the universe. As far as discovering species on Earth: we have many data points there so it's much easier to make meaningful predictions. So far we don't even know for certain that there is other life in our galaxy. For all we know life may occur at a rate of, say, once per galaxy per billion years, and then only survive long enough to evolve to any significant level of complexity 10-20% of the time. Personally I doubt it's that low, but we have no evidence for either side of the argument. It amounts to just intuition at this point.
gibrown 10y ago
Interesting use of inference. Kinda feels like it ignores many of the discussions (or my limited understanding of them) around the Fermi paradox http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html In summary: "We’re rare, we’re first, or we’re fucked." The article seems to assume that there are lots of populations just because there are lots of planets. But the time that those planets have been around matters too.
- kirykl 10y ago
  That's only if there's a great filter though
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    There's no accepted resolution to both Sagan's posited frequency of life and Fermi's paradox other than filters.
    - hodwik2 10y ago
      I would argue that this article posits a new, compelling filter. If most species are large, and from small planets, they will have much stricter resource constraints than we did. As a result, they are unlikely to have industrialized the way we did, as it would have depleted their resources too quickly. As a result, they are unlikely to be a silicon-age species. Drawing from the author's biological/size argument, they're likely to have longer lifespans than we do, and considerably fewer births. Given their resource constraints, and longer lifespans, they are likely to have strong communal systems of resource allocation, and are unlikely to have moved towards Capitalism. Given their longer lifespans, they are probably more risk averse than our own species -- as willingness for an animal to die is strongly related to size and lifespan. This suggests they may be less war-faring than ourselves, and thus less likely to have nations. Given their closer relationship with nature, due to their resource constraints, they're likely to have developed a Pagan system of thought, rather than a monotheistic theology. As a result, they are unlikely to be motivated towards large infrastructural, imperial or technological projects as a result of: profit motive, national motive, or religious motive. I'd argue then, that it is unlikely they have produced a civilization of significance. -- Long story short; local alien species are likely to be tribal, communist, non-technological, and environmentalist. If through some strange force a species of this kind managed to become technologically advanced, they would likely look down on a species such as our own as a sort of vermin, because of our numbers, hunger and short lives.
gmaslov 10y ago
Couldn't a hypothetical Big Alien make exactly the same argument? There are plenty of exoplanets larger than Earth.
- wrsh07 10y ago
  Of course they could. And they should! Statistically, if every single sentient being makes this argument, more sentient beings will be right than wrong. To quote: > Given the prevalence of the four different blood groups in the cartoon above, the most profitable strategy here would be to bet on "A", as that gives you the greatest chance of winning. Another way of looking at it, is that if everyone adopted that strategy, the bookmaker would lose the most money.
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
>No matter what degree of variability is chosen, alien planets are very unlikely to be much larger than the Earth. To be specific, we can say with 95% confidence that another planet with intelligent life, such as our nearest neighbour, will have a circumference no more than 20% greater than that of the Earth. Huh? I see no justification for this. I'm firmly in the "We know nothing about aliens and won't until we get some hard data" camp. Alien life will, by definition, be alien. We have no basis for assuming it's even going to be recognisable as life. Life essentially seems to be a persistent self-reproducing dissipative structure that responds to evolutionary pressure. There is nothing in the manual that requires liquid water, gravity, a planetary surface, carbon, or any of the other ingredients that define life on Earth.
- fergussimpson 10y ago
  If we are talking about alien life in general, I completely agree. But this calculation relates specifically to intelligent life. And from that collection we can deduce something, as explained in the website. The calculation assumes nothing about the presence of water or carbon.
- erik_landerholm 10y ago
  I see no justification for anything in this article. His assumption that beings like us (ability to reason about our place in the universe and even leave our own planet's gravity well) are common is dubious. There is no evidence of that at all.
  - dsmithatx 10y ago
    > His assumption that beings like us (ability to reason about our place in the universe and even leave our own planet's gravity well) are common is dubious. There is no evidence of that at all. Yes I want to believe this but, I'm afraid there is no science behind it. Based on # of galaxies and stars it does seem logical however, what unknown variables also equate into determining this? Needless to say I stopped reading after this assumption in the first paragraph.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
mixedbit 10y ago
In 'Solaris' by Lem the whole planet is an alien life form.
bitdeveloper 10y ago
I'm unclear on why the author posits that we should assume a smaller population necessarily means the average being will be larger. For example, if a human did this thought experiment 2000 years ago - a blink of the eye in the scale we are talking about - we would have perhaps 500,000,000 humans on the planet, or something along those lines. We have 14x as many humans now. Yet we have not shrunk in size as the species has grown in population, and if anything, have grown larger. If we look at the total biomass on earth, we are a fairly small portion of it. So shouldn't we assume, as we are assuming our situation is average, that intelligent aliens are also a fairly small portion of their planet's biomass? And if so, wouldn't the size of the aliens themselves be something that has very little to do with the total energy reaching the planet surface? I get that it's just statistical probability and math, and it's fun, but this particular thing stuck out for me. It was a fun read regardless, so thank you for the break from work!
- wrsh07 10y ago
  They actually respond to you in the FAQ: > "What if people who lived several centuries ago did a calculation on how many births there would be?" > This appears to be one of the most widespread misconceptions on the topic. Many scientists have fallen into this trap, such as Lee Smolin's article from 2004 . In science there is never absolute certainty, only varying degrees of confidence. We should never be 100% sure of anything. When stating the degree of confidence in a result, typically 95%, it should be in full knowledge that one time out of twenty, we will be wrong. 5% of the time we will be misled by statistical chance. > Now if someone who lived tens of thousands of years ago estimates the total number of human births, based on how many there had already been, they will underestimate the truth. Because we now know there has been many more. But those first 5% of people who ever lived represent the 5% of the time we expect to be wrong. This is a basic premise of how science functions, how it uses statistics. We must be wrong some of the time. In reality, we are wrong much more frequently than statistical chance suggests, because of human error or misunderstanding.
  - codys 10y ago
    > several centuries ago > tens of thousands of years ago This appears to be blatantly moving the goal posts. > those first 5% of people who ever lived represent the 5% of the time we expect to be wrong This implies that for only 5% of human history the calculation would be wrong, and the reset of the time it would be 100% correct. I'm not sure that is how statistics work.
ccvannorman 10y ago
This article strikes me as a man who lives entirely inside a black and white room insisting that if he thinks hard enough, he can infer what colors in the world outside are like. It is true though, that if you spin a black and white patterned disk, you will see colors.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  Nobody put us in any room. We're at large. That is the difference.
- mesozoic 10y ago
  It's more like he can say what the colors outside the room are PROBABLY like.
catpolice 10y ago
I think some of the math going on here is interesting and probably has some interesting consequences for people's expectations about means. But I'm not sure about that paper... I want to be generous here and assume I'm misunderstanding, but it does seem a bit like the argument begs the question a bit. The intended conclusion is that we should consider non-earth-like (i.e. non-earth-sized) planets as just as likely to be inhabited as earth-like planets. Which is to say that we shouldn't expect that population density is strongly correlated with planet size. And this is shown starting from a model where "mean population density is invariant to planet size". Hmm...
frechtoast 10y ago
I'm of the opinion that life doesn't exist elsewhere. That said, I don't care enough to even try to support my own bias. I'm not going to spend time trying to get anyone to believe either way, because we've got bigger issues right now. Aliens aren't here, starvation is. How did this ridiculous tinfoil-hat article even make it into Hacker News!?
- drdeca 10y ago
  Is it tinfoil hat? I was not under the impression that it was suggesting any sort of conspiracy or anything. Even if the arguments it makes are wrong I'm not under the impression that they are particularly kooky.
frechtoast 10y ago
What is less worthwhile for a person to think about than the existence of aliens? Sure, solve world hunger, figure out inter-space travel, light-years distant communication mechanisms, prevent cancer, war, poverty.... Last I checked, aliens weren't threatening the continuation of our species, or even leaving the lid up after a visit to the john for that matter. How did this tinfoil-hat ridiculous article even make it into Hacker news!?
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  If aliens are indeed to be found, this will readily become number one important event in human history.
  - frechtoast 10y ago
    I bet!, And if a meteorite strikes my home and kills me, that will be the most important event in my life. Nevertheless, I've got more pressing issues than to debate the statistical likelihood of the size of the rock or it's expected mineral composition.
    - nickcano 10y ago
      Yes, and those more pressing issues are among spending time debating why it's not worthwhile to spend time debating a topic that is less pressing than the debate about the time it takes, apparently.
- roywiggins 10y ago
  It's a hobby, like building model airplanes or playing Call of Duty. Nobody said it had to be worthwhile. It's probably more worthwhile than commenting on Hacker News, but that's a judgement call.
Gravityloss 10y ago
This is a bit like the sleeping beauty paradox. [1] We have to be careful what we're sampling. Is it individuals or civilizations? An average civilization will be average sized. An average individual will belong to a larger-than average civilization. It's also a bit like the problem that in average, your friends have more friends than you do. (That's easy to understand. It's because they are not a really random sample of all people. People with more connections are over-represented in your friends.) If we assume that observation doesn't depend on civilization size, then we're sampling civilizations, and on average would find average sized civilizations. If we assume that we observe individuals and not civilizations, then we're sampling individuals and are likely to see individuals of a big civilization. Now, if I look at myself, if I'm a random sample from all individuals in the galaxy, it's likely that I'm part of a large civilization. That would mean other civilizations would on average be smaller than mine. If I look at my civilization, and assume it's a random sample from all the civilizations in the galaxy, it's likely that it's an average sized civilization. A random other individual in the galaxy would be likely from a larger civilization. I don't think either way of thinking is really justified. You can extend this to a doomsday argument by the way. Since I am alive now, it's most likely that most people are alive now. Hence in the past and in the future, there will be less people alive. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149286
- jstanley 10y ago
  This is good reasoning. Can you expand on the "waking amnesiac problem"? Google is coming up with nothing.
  - Gravityloss 10y ago
    Edited the original to include the actual name, sleeping beauty paradox.
oconnor663 10y ago
> Within the context of the animal kingdom, our species' position is clear. Aside from a disproportionately large brain, we're fairly ordinary mammals. Oh yeah? :) http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/57702943181/mikhailvladimirovich-bogleech-its-funny-how http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/57702943181/mikhailvladimir...
srcreigh 10y ago
The idea of interplanetary species seems to invalidate this website in one fell swoop.
aab0 10y ago
This essay would benefit from making the particular anthropics used like the Self-Sampling Assumption explicit (and the paradoxical implications of it which leads to rejection by many) and explaining examples like the Doomsday Problem.
Touche 10y ago
Something not mentioned here is the relationship between oxygen levels in the atmosphere and the size of animals on a planet. During the era of giant creatures (dinosaurs) the atmosphere was around 35% oxygen, today it is about 21%.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Why isn't the conclusion "our population size is the most frequent" versus "largest"?
- rory 10y ago
  I think he's approaching it from the assumption that a sentient being should assume itself to be a random individual out of all the sentient beings in existence, across all sentient species.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    Doesn't that ignore the obvious (and known a priori) correlation between sentient beings in a species?
pi-err 10y ago
Great thought experiment. I would have thought that a planet's life form, shape and variety would be determined by: 1- the energy output of nearest star 2- the planet's gravity He barely mentions gravity which is surprising. Earthlings probably wouldn't be as tall with 1.3x more gravity. Maybe life wouldn't even have made it out of water, or much more slowly. Evolution would mean "heavier" eggs would be harder to carry. The entire evolution process hangs around reproduction so what would that mean? Same for less gravity - except it would _probably_ be on a smaller planet. Gravity correlates with planet size in the solar system. Would <0.8G be enough to retain water, atmosphere, etc? Somehow I'm not surprised to find out one day that an intelligent alien life would look a lot like us, on a planet that looks a lot like Earth.
- 1812Overture 10y ago
  They'd look a lot like us except they'd all be 1930s gangsters or ancient Romans.
GrantS 10y ago
Interesting analysis, but after reading the FAQ at the bottom, it rests upon quite a few important hidden assumptions. For example: >However if there is any hope of finding life on other planets, there must be a huge number of planets with life in the Universe. Therefore, for the case we're interested in... So during the entire analysis, we were limiting ourselves only to those universes in which we do make alien contact, regardless of how likely that event is.
chmike 10y ago
This analysis is based on many unjustified assumptions. I don't think we can go reliably very far on this route. However, I do think that we can scientifically study some aliens today, or more precisely what we can see from them, through the UFO phenomenon. Yes, that thing! For me the only paradox in the Fermi paradox is that the UFO phenomenon is boycotted as a manifestation of Aliens on earth. The following three articles are a product of such study. They present a new electromagnetic propulsion system called PEMP inspired by the data of UFO observations. It also present a totally innovative method to produce the intense EM fields required by this propulsion system. These are currently only theories waiting for an experimental validation. The author is a physic theorist, not an experimentalist. "Pulsed EM Propulsion of Unconventional Flying Objects":http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Propulsion.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Propulsion.pdf "Evidence of Very Strong Low Frequency Magnetic Fields": http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Evidence.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Evidence.pdf "Production of EM Surface Waves by Superconducting Spheres: A New Type of Harmonic Oscillators": http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Production.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Production.pdf So there is no need to speculate. Just open your eyes and look at the data we already have for so many years. Note that this is the product of an inductive research process. The initial working hypothesis was that UFO are real and witnesses report real data on them. Now see if we can derive a valid propulsion system matching the described artifacts using only conventional physics law. It was initially a test, an experiment on a pure theoretical ground. The test is apparently conclusive. We now have a theory we can test in our lab and we could validate a disruptive discovery. Objectively, we still don't know if UFOs are real and they are aliens visiting earth. But we now have an opportunity to indirectly test that possibility with pure solid ground science and engineering. Thanks to these theories.
- smaddox 10y ago
  Poe's law?
  - chmike 10y ago
    I'm very serious. Is that all you have as "argument" ? Supposing you referred to my comment on the big alien theory, as a biologist, I would say that this pure statistical analysis ignores the possible existence of yet unknown factors that could modulate the probability of existence of alien civilization of different size, planet size or intelligence. This is why I concluded that this work is based on a pure speculation that these unknown factors don't exist. I didn't say this work is false or bad. I said it won't move us reliably forward on this research topic.
deleted 10y ago
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gone35 10y ago
Reminds me of Joe Polchinski's calculation[1] that the probability of the multiverse is 94%. Unbridled Physics-ism (as in [2]) and Bayesianism definitely don't mix well. [1] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8149 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8149 [2] https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
joeyspn 10y ago
A couple of weeks ago I read a more compelling theory, that also is an interesting solution for the Fermi Paradox. It said something like this IIRC: The normal evolution of a civilisation of smart species is to arrive to a point where they experience an Intelligence Explosion [0]. (or how Elon Musk puts it: Chances are we're the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence) [1]. In a cosmic scale, given the fact that the timespan to go from industrial/high technology civilisation to a SuperAI is like a drop in the ocean (1000 or 2000 years), it'd be impossible to establish contact unless they co-exist at the same point of evolution, in the same (or near) star system, and in the same period of time. Something far from probable... I think that this is the most plausible solution for the Fermi Paradox, we haven't been contacted by Aliens for the same reason that we haven't "contacted" with ant colonies or microbes. We simply can't, we're in a different state of consciousness. We are probably living among Aliens, but they're too advanced for our reasoning and live in a different dimension/cosmic state. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/496012177103663104 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/496012177103663104
matheweis 10y ago
Serious question; why are people willing to seriously entertain the idea of aliens, but not gods?
- Quinner 10y ago
  Because we are living proof that alien life is possible. If alien life exists, we are alien life to them.
- roywiggins 10y ago
  We have proof that life exists here, so we know it's physically possible. It appears that physics works more or less the same everywhere, and the universe is really big.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  First, you probably need to define "god". Does a biological being like us but with extremely advanced technology count? Or do they need to be able to exist beyond conventional physics and have apparently limitless power in our universe, like Q? Or do you mean specific gods, namely the ones which various groups of humans worship? If it's #1, those are just aliens. If #2, I don't think you can discount the possibility entirely, but there's no evidence for their existence, but it's entirely possible. But spending any energy on the question seems a bit pointless, since no members of the Q Continuum have made their presence known to us yet. If #3, the problem there is there's no good evidence for their existence, only ancient stories passed down from oral tradition, and the old "telephone game" shows how reliable that is, plus the well-known phenomenon of hallucination, which can happen to people when they eat certain tainted foods. The question of aliens is worth considering seriously because we do know that life is possible (look in the mirror), we know under what conditions if can form (look outside; we have a planet to study that formed life), and now we know that lots of other planets are out there, and some of them may very well be similar to our own. If we can evolve here, it's quite possible some other beings evolved elsewhere under similar conditions. And with many billions of stars out there (just in our galaxy and nearby ones), the probability of other planets existing with conditions similar to ours is high. Furthermore, as our ability to detect exoplanets improves, it's quite possible we may detect signs of alien life: radio signals, industrial emissions in their atmosphere, weird starlight patterns indicating a possible Dyson swarm, etc. There's no way to detect any kind of god (whether it's one from some old book or the Q).
tbabb 10y ago
What is the process by which "samples" are drawn from the population of intelligent beings? This is a keystone of the article's argument, but it entirely hand-waved. It is not as if "intelligences" are created in the void and then assigned with some random distribution (uniform or otherwise) to bodies on planets-- each intelligent being in the universe is itself with probability 1.
Houshalter 10y ago
This strikes me as very similar to the simulation argument. That is most beings probably exist in simulations, and therefore you are far more likely to exist in a simulation than be a living person. Or similar anthropic arguments could be made about many things. You are more likely to be living in a bigger country, you are more likely to be living in the period of time where Earth's population is the largest, etc.

136 points by miralabs 10y ago

tronje 10y ago

Please, for all our eyes' sake, change the color of the font to something darker! Light-grey on white is just terrible.

fergussimpson 10y ago
Thanks, I've fixed it now!
- tronje 10y ago
  Thank you! I didn't mean to come across as overly critical, but I really think it is a much nicer reading experience now. Very cool that you considered my criticism :)

andrewclunn 10y ago

Wrong. We have no notion if we are more or less populas than other species, so we should assome that we are one of the many smaller (in number) by virtue of that being the more common, thus drawing the exact opposite conclusions.

deciplex 10y ago
That's what we should expect to see when looking for other planets with intelligent life. But you, andrewclunn, should expect to live among one of the more populous species.
- andrewclunn 10y ago
  That's the point, from the individual's perspective the correct prediction is completely contrary to that from the species' perspective based on this approach.
  - deciplex 10y ago
    Right. So you, the individual reading the article and posting on HN, should expect to live among one of the more populous species of life in the universe. e: Maybe you are implicitly assuming that the workflow for "determining" who you are born as goes: 1. pick a random species 2. pick a random individual in that species. But it's more like: 1. pick a random individual.

anotheryou 10y ago

I can't wrap my head around the "we should expect to be in a large group". We, as a single species, found to the question "is there alien life besides us?". I'm no individual independent from the culture of our species. I don't come up with this question randomly, you pointed me to this today. The other way around: I have to expect to be in the large group only, if the large group makes it more likely that someone in it has questions about his group (more members -> more random thoughts -> greater total of thoughts about which group one is in). This is true for blood types (unless people with weird blood types commonly get in to issues making them wonder about their blood type...). But for aliens, probably either more or less all wonder collectively through cultural exchange, or it wasn't part of a public debate. Hm, you get the knot in my brain? can you solve it?

phreeza 10y ago
I do get the knot. My gut feeling would be that the definition of an individual in this case is "an entity that is capable of independent thought". So if all our thoughts as a species were perfectly in sync (borg-style), we would count as a species of population 1. Because of cultural exchange, one would probably have to count us as a species of effective size less than that of the actual population size.

marcus_holmes 10y ago

I don't get the stats here: - I am an ordinary sentient being (for the sake of argument... just nod) - I am a member of an ordinary species. according this theory one of these statements is wrong.

deciplex 10y ago
According the reasoning here it's the second one that's wrong (or rather, unlikely). btw fergussimpson your posts are showing up dead but then are getting undeaded after a certain period of time I guess. Your first post here was dead for a while and now it isn't. Your reply to this parent is dead as of writing this post. I guess it's because you have a new account - I wasn't aware we were auto-hellbanning people now, though. How annoying.
- fergussimpson 10y ago
  Hmm that's unfortunate. How do I become un-dead?!
  - arjie 10y ago
    What's likely happening is someone's vouching for your comments. I did that for your other one. You should rapidly become considered a normal user, but I'm told emailing HN is what you do if you continue to be auto marked dead.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
      How do you vouch for someone? I can't see an option - is it like flagging?
      - DanBC 10y ago
        Click the time stamp of the comment and the vouch link should show. You need a karma level of 30 for the flag / vouch links to appear. You need to have showdead turned on to see the comments that have been flagged. Here are two comments from dang about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478886#up_10480270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478886#up_10480270

zby 10y ago

So they do something like this: Let's choose a human in random - he is more probable to be from Pakistan than from Slovakia. (OK) Now let's choose a country - now an average country like Slovakia is more probable than a country as big as Pakistan. (OK) So if you are a human - then it is most probable that you live in a country that is more populous than the typical country. (OK) Now they say - ok - so now instead of choosing humans let's do the same thing with sentient beings. If you are a sentient being it is more probable that you live on a planet where there are many other sentient beings rather than on a planet that there are few of them. But if you go to some random planet with sentient life - then the expected number of sentient beings there would be average. Then it goes on that "Physically larger species will on average have lower population densities." - so most probably the random alien planet will have fewer and larger sentient beings than us. I don't know if I buy that whole argument - but I am too lazy to write the bayesian equations to nail it down.

wrsh07 10y ago
If you want the math, that's here: http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org/content/456/1/L59 http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org/content/456/1/L59
- deleted 10y ago
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leblancfg 10y ago
My only gripe is that he's only used vertebrates in his dataset (based on http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078733 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....). It's "only human" to include close members on the phylogenetic tree, but I see it as a flaw. What if our imaginary aliens are plant-like, squid-like, or something we can't even begin to fathom, like symbiotic unicellulars? Sentient, self-replicating machine clusters the size of planets? Take a minute to think about this. I think his conclusion should then have been worded like: the random alien planet will have fewer and larger VERTEBRATES than us. And that's a probably very meaningless conclusion. I'm not saying his intuition is wrong, though. In fact I quite like it. But in this scenario, I don't think "whatever remains, however unlikely" lifeforms can even begin to be imagined by our tiny little human brains.

garbage_stain 10y ago

"Not even wrong". This entire analysis is built on reasonable statistics which are predicated on dubious and unprovable assumptions, which invalidate the entire thing. Consider "the size of alien species". Okay... so we are extrapolating about the size of beings we know nothing about based on those beings that have come to existence in our particular situation? Assuming that the distribution of weight across animals on Earth is the same as the distribution of weight across beings in the universe is dubious. This is a wonderful example of Brandolini's law.

jak1192 10y ago
That is not an example of Brandolini's law. It took a whole website to spew the bullshit but only 3 or so sentences for you to refute it.
- klue07 10y ago
  garbage_stain is only refuting a very small part of the entire website. Imagine the amount of effort to properly refute the entire website addressing each BS point.
api 10y ago
The simple fact is that we have one example of a biosphere: Earth. You can't say much of anything meaningful from a sample size of one. We have no idea what aliens could be like, how many there might be, etc. until we either go find some or some (or their signals) come here.
- indrax 10y ago
  What will discovering one alien race tell us about other aliens? Can we predict anything about the next unknown species discovered on earth?
  - api 10y ago
    If we discovered other aliens we'd have a sample size of two at least, which would enable us to say something a little more meaningful about the distribution of life in the universe. As far as discovering species on Earth: we have many data points there so it's much easier to make meaningful predictions. So far we don't even know for certain that there is other life in our galaxy. For all we know life may occur at a rate of, say, once per galaxy per billion years, and then only survive long enough to evolve to any significant level of complexity 10-20% of the time. Personally I doubt it's that low, but we have no evidence for either side of the argument. It amounts to just intuition at this point.

gibrown 10y ago

Interesting use of inference. Kinda feels like it ignores many of the discussions (or my limited understanding of them) around the Fermi paradox http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html In summary: "We’re rare, we’re first, or we’re fucked." The article seems to assume that there are lots of populations just because there are lots of planets. But the time that those planets have been around matters too.

kirykl 10y ago
That's only if there's a great filter though
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  There's no accepted resolution to both Sagan's posited frequency of life and Fermi's paradox other than filters.
  - hodwik2 10y ago
    I would argue that this article posits a new, compelling filter. If most species are large, and from small planets, they will have much stricter resource constraints than we did. As a result, they are unlikely to have industrialized the way we did, as it would have depleted their resources too quickly. As a result, they are unlikely to be a silicon-age species. Drawing from the author's biological/size argument, they're likely to have longer lifespans than we do, and considerably fewer births. Given their resource constraints, and longer lifespans, they are likely to have strong communal systems of resource allocation, and are unlikely to have moved towards Capitalism. Given their longer lifespans, they are probably more risk averse than our own species -- as willingness for an animal to die is strongly related to size and lifespan. This suggests they may be less war-faring than ourselves, and thus less likely to have nations. Given their closer relationship with nature, due to their resource constraints, they're likely to have developed a Pagan system of thought, rather than a monotheistic theology. As a result, they are unlikely to be motivated towards large infrastructural, imperial or technological projects as a result of: profit motive, national motive, or religious motive. I'd argue then, that it is unlikely they have produced a civilization of significance. -- Long story short; local alien species are likely to be tribal, communist, non-technological, and environmentalist. If through some strange force a species of this kind managed to become technologically advanced, they would likely look down on a species such as our own as a sort of vermin, because of our numbers, hunger and short lives.

gmaslov 10y ago

Couldn't a hypothetical Big Alien make exactly the same argument? There are plenty of exoplanets larger than Earth.

wrsh07 10y ago
Of course they could. And they should! Statistically, if every single sentient being makes this argument, more sentient beings will be right than wrong. To quote: > Given the prevalence of the four different blood groups in the cartoon above, the most profitable strategy here would be to bet on "A", as that gives you the greatest chance of winning. Another way of looking at it, is that if everyone adopted that strategy, the bookmaker would lose the most money.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago

>No matter what degree of variability is chosen, alien planets are very unlikely to be much larger than the Earth. To be specific, we can say with 95% confidence that another planet with intelligent life, such as our nearest neighbour, will have a circumference no more than 20% greater than that of the Earth. Huh? I see no justification for this. I'm firmly in the "We know nothing about aliens and won't until we get some hard data" camp. Alien life will, by definition, be alien. We have no basis for assuming it's even going to be recognisable as life. Life essentially seems to be a persistent self-reproducing dissipative structure that responds to evolutionary pressure. There is nothing in the manual that requires liquid water, gravity, a planetary surface, carbon, or any of the other ingredients that define life on Earth.

fergussimpson 10y ago
If we are talking about alien life in general, I completely agree. But this calculation relates specifically to intelligent life. And from that collection we can deduce something, as explained in the website. The calculation assumes nothing about the presence of water or carbon.
erik_landerholm 10y ago
I see no justification for anything in this article. His assumption that beings like us (ability to reason about our place in the universe and even leave our own planet's gravity well) are common is dubious. There is no evidence of that at all.
- dsmithatx 10y ago
  > His assumption that beings like us (ability to reason about our place in the universe and even leave our own planet's gravity well) are common is dubious. There is no evidence of that at all. Yes I want to believe this but, I'm afraid there is no science behind it. Based on # of galaxies and stars it does seem logical however, what unknown variables also equate into determining this? Needless to say I stopped reading after this assumption in the first paragraph.
- aidenn0 10y ago

mixedbit 10y ago

In 'Solaris' by Lem the whole planet is an alien life form.

bitdeveloper 10y ago

I'm unclear on why the author posits that we should assume a smaller population necessarily means the average being will be larger. For example, if a human did this thought experiment 2000 years ago - a blink of the eye in the scale we are talking about - we would have perhaps 500,000,000 humans on the planet, or something along those lines. We have 14x as many humans now. Yet we have not shrunk in size as the species has grown in population, and if anything, have grown larger. If we look at the total biomass on earth, we are a fairly small portion of it. So shouldn't we assume, as we are assuming our situation is average, that intelligent aliens are also a fairly small portion of their planet's biomass? And if so, wouldn't the size of the aliens themselves be something that has very little to do with the total energy reaching the planet surface? I get that it's just statistical probability and math, and it's fun, but this particular thing stuck out for me. It was a fun read regardless, so thank you for the break from work!

wrsh07 10y ago
They actually respond to you in the FAQ: > "What if people who lived several centuries ago did a calculation on how many births there would be?" > This appears to be one of the most widespread misconceptions on the topic. Many scientists have fallen into this trap, such as Lee Smolin's article from 2004 . In science there is never absolute certainty, only varying degrees of confidence. We should never be 100% sure of anything. When stating the degree of confidence in a result, typically 95%, it should be in full knowledge that one time out of twenty, we will be wrong. 5% of the time we will be misled by statistical chance. > Now if someone who lived tens of thousands of years ago estimates the total number of human births, based on how many there had already been, they will underestimate the truth. Because we now know there has been many more. But those first 5% of people who ever lived represent the 5% of the time we expect to be wrong. This is a basic premise of how science functions, how it uses statistics. We must be wrong some of the time. In reality, we are wrong much more frequently than statistical chance suggests, because of human error or misunderstanding.
- codys 10y ago
  > several centuries ago > tens of thousands of years ago This appears to be blatantly moving the goal posts. > those first 5% of people who ever lived represent the 5% of the time we expect to be wrong This implies that for only 5% of human history the calculation would be wrong, and the reset of the time it would be 100% correct. I'm not sure that is how statistics work.

ccvannorman 10y ago

This article strikes me as a man who lives entirely inside a black and white room insisting that if he thinks hard enough, he can infer what colors in the world outside are like. It is true though, that if you spin a black and white patterned disk, you will see colors.

guard-of-terra 10y ago
Nobody put us in any room. We're at large. That is the difference.
mesozoic 10y ago
It's more like he can say what the colors outside the room are PROBABLY like.

catpolice 10y ago

I think some of the math going on here is interesting and probably has some interesting consequences for people's expectations about means. But I'm not sure about that paper... I want to be generous here and assume I'm misunderstanding, but it does seem a bit like the argument begs the question a bit. The intended conclusion is that we should consider non-earth-like (i.e. non-earth-sized) planets as just as likely to be inhabited as earth-like planets. Which is to say that we shouldn't expect that population density is strongly correlated with planet size. And this is shown starting from a model where "mean population density is invariant to planet size". Hmm...

frechtoast 10y ago

I'm of the opinion that life doesn't exist elsewhere. That said, I don't care enough to even try to support my own bias. I'm not going to spend time trying to get anyone to believe either way, because we've got bigger issues right now. Aliens aren't here, starvation is. How did this ridiculous tinfoil-hat article even make it into Hacker News!?

drdeca 10y ago
Is it tinfoil hat? I was not under the impression that it was suggesting any sort of conspiracy or anything. Even if the arguments it makes are wrong I'm not under the impression that they are particularly kooky.

frechtoast 10y ago

What is less worthwhile for a person to think about than the existence of aliens? Sure, solve world hunger, figure out inter-space travel, light-years distant communication mechanisms, prevent cancer, war, poverty.... Last I checked, aliens weren't threatening the continuation of our species, or even leaving the lid up after a visit to the john for that matter. How did this tinfoil-hat ridiculous article even make it into Hacker news!?

guard-of-terra 10y ago
If aliens are indeed to be found, this will readily become number one important event in human history.
- frechtoast 10y ago
  I bet!, And if a meteorite strikes my home and kills me, that will be the most important event in my life. Nevertheless, I've got more pressing issues than to debate the statistical likelihood of the size of the rock or it's expected mineral composition.
  - nickcano 10y ago
    Yes, and those more pressing issues are among spending time debating why it's not worthwhile to spend time debating a topic that is less pressing than the debate about the time it takes, apparently.
roywiggins 10y ago
It's a hobby, like building model airplanes or playing Call of Duty. Nobody said it had to be worthwhile. It's probably more worthwhile than commenting on Hacker News, but that's a judgement call.

Gravityloss 10y ago

This is a bit like the sleeping beauty paradox. [1] We have to be careful what we're sampling. Is it individuals or civilizations? An average civilization will be average sized. An average individual will belong to a larger-than average civilization. It's also a bit like the problem that in average, your friends have more friends than you do. (That's easy to understand. It's because they are not a really random sample of all people. People with more connections are over-represented in your friends.) If we assume that observation doesn't depend on civilization size, then we're sampling civilizations, and on average would find average sized civilizations. If we assume that we observe individuals and not civilizations, then we're sampling individuals and are likely to see individuals of a big civilization. Now, if I look at myself, if I'm a random sample from all individuals in the galaxy, it's likely that I'm part of a large civilization. That would mean other civilizations would on average be smaller than mine. If I look at my civilization, and assume it's a random sample from all the civilizations in the galaxy, it's likely that it's an average sized civilization. A random other individual in the galaxy would be likely from a larger civilization. I don't think either way of thinking is really justified. You can extend this to a doomsday argument by the way. Since I am alive now, it's most likely that most people are alive now. Hence in the past and in the future, there will be less people alive. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149286

jstanley 10y ago
This is good reasoning. Can you expand on the "waking amnesiac problem"? Google is coming up with nothing.
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  Edited the original to include the actual name, sleeping beauty paradox.

oconnor663 10y ago

> Within the context of the animal kingdom, our species' position is clear. Aside from a disproportionately large brain, we're fairly ordinary mammals. Oh yeah? :) http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/57702943181/mikhailvladimirovich-bogleech-its-funny-how http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/57702943181/mikhailvladimir...

srcreigh 10y ago

The idea of interplanetary species seems to invalidate this website in one fell swoop.

aab0 10y ago

This essay would benefit from making the particular anthropics used like the Self-Sampling Assumption explicit (and the paradoxical implications of it which leads to rejection by many) and explaining examples like the Doomsday Problem.

Touche 10y ago

Something not mentioned here is the relationship between oxygen levels in the atmosphere and the size of animals on a planet. During the era of giant creatures (dinosaurs) the atmosphere was around 35% oxygen, today it is about 21%.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

Why isn't the conclusion "our population size is the most frequent" versus "largest"?

rory 10y ago
I think he's approaching it from the assumption that a sentient being should assume itself to be a random individual out of all the sentient beings in existence, across all sentient species.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Doesn't that ignore the obvious (and known a priori) correlation between sentient beings in a species?

pi-err 10y ago

Great thought experiment. I would have thought that a planet's life form, shape and variety would be determined by: 1- the energy output of nearest star 2- the planet's gravity He barely mentions gravity which is surprising. Earthlings probably wouldn't be as tall with 1.3x more gravity. Maybe life wouldn't even have made it out of water, or much more slowly. Evolution would mean "heavier" eggs would be harder to carry. The entire evolution process hangs around reproduction so what would that mean? Same for less gravity - except it would _probably_ be on a smaller planet. Gravity correlates with planet size in the solar system. Would <0.8G be enough to retain water, atmosphere, etc? Somehow I'm not surprised to find out one day that an intelligent alien life would look a lot like us, on a planet that looks a lot like Earth.

1812Overture 10y ago
They'd look a lot like us except they'd all be 1930s gangsters or ancient Romans.

GrantS 10y ago

Interesting analysis, but after reading the FAQ at the bottom, it rests upon quite a few important hidden assumptions. For example: >However if there is any hope of finding life on other planets, there must be a huge number of planets with life in the Universe. Therefore, for the case we're interested in... So during the entire analysis, we were limiting ourselves only to those universes in which we do make alien contact, regardless of how likely that event is.

chmike 10y ago

This analysis is based on many unjustified assumptions. I don't think we can go reliably very far on this route. However, I do think that we can scientifically study some aliens today, or more precisely what we can see from them, through the UFO phenomenon. Yes, that thing! For me the only paradox in the Fermi paradox is that the UFO phenomenon is boycotted as a manifestation of Aliens on earth. The following three articles are a product of such study. They present a new electromagnetic propulsion system called PEMP inspired by the data of UFO observations. It also present a totally innovative method to produce the intense EM fields required by this propulsion system. These are currently only theories waiting for an experimental validation. The author is a physic theorist, not an experimentalist. "Pulsed EM Propulsion of Unconventional Flying Objects":http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Propulsion.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Propulsion.pdf "Evidence of Very Strong Low Frequency Magnetic Fields": http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Evidence.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Evidence.pdf "Production of EM Surface Waves by Superconducting Spheres: A New Type of Harmonic Oscillators": http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Production.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Production.pdf So there is no need to speculate. Just open your eyes and look at the data we already have for so many years. Note that this is the product of an inductive research process. The initial working hypothesis was that UFO are real and witnesses report real data on them. Now see if we can derive a valid propulsion system matching the described artifacts using only conventional physics law. It was initially a test, an experiment on a pure theoretical ground. The test is apparently conclusive. We now have a theory we can test in our lab and we could validate a disruptive discovery. Objectively, we still don't know if UFOs are real and they are aliens visiting earth. But we now have an opportunity to indirectly test that possibility with pure solid ground science and engineering. Thanks to these theories.

smaddox 10y ago
Poe's law?
- chmike 10y ago
  I'm very serious. Is that all you have as "argument" ? Supposing you referred to my comment on the big alien theory, as a biologist, I would say that this pure statistical analysis ignores the possible existence of yet unknown factors that could modulate the probability of existence of alien civilization of different size, planet size or intelligence. This is why I concluded that this work is based on a pure speculation that these unknown factors don't exist. I didn't say this work is false or bad. I said it won't move us reliably forward on this research topic.

deleted 10y ago

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gone35 10y ago

Reminds me of Joe Polchinski's calculation[1] that the probability of the multiverse is 94%. Unbridled Physics-ism (as in [2]) and Bayesianism definitely don't mix well. [1] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8149 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8149 [2] https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/

joeyspn 10y ago

A couple of weeks ago I read a more compelling theory, that also is an interesting solution for the Fermi Paradox. It said something like this IIRC: The normal evolution of a civilisation of smart species is to arrive to a point where they experience an Intelligence Explosion [0]. (or how Elon Musk puts it: Chances are we're the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence) [1]. In a cosmic scale, given the fact that the timespan to go from industrial/high technology civilisation to a SuperAI is like a drop in the ocean (1000 or 2000 years), it'd be impossible to establish contact unless they co-exist at the same point of evolution, in the same (or near) star system, and in the same period of time. Something far from probable... I think that this is the most plausible solution for the Fermi Paradox, we haven't been contacted by Aliens for the same reason that we haven't "contacted" with ant colonies or microbes. We simply can't, we're in a different state of consciousness. We are probably living among Aliens, but they're too advanced for our reasoning and live in a different dimension/cosmic state. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/496012177103663104 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/496012177103663104

matheweis 10y ago

Serious question; why are people willing to seriously entertain the idea of aliens, but not gods?

Quinner 10y ago
Because we are living proof that alien life is possible. If alien life exists, we are alien life to them.
roywiggins 10y ago
We have proof that life exists here, so we know it's physically possible. It appears that physics works more or less the same everywhere, and the universe is really big.
Grishnakh 10y ago
First, you probably need to define "god". Does a biological being like us but with extremely advanced technology count? Or do they need to be able to exist beyond conventional physics and have apparently limitless power in our universe, like Q? Or do you mean specific gods, namely the ones which various groups of humans worship? If it's #1, those are just aliens. If #2, I don't think you can discount the possibility entirely, but there's no evidence for their existence, but it's entirely possible. But spending any energy on the question seems a bit pointless, since no members of the Q Continuum have made their presence known to us yet. If #3, the problem there is there's no good evidence for their existence, only ancient stories passed down from oral tradition, and the old "telephone game" shows how reliable that is, plus the well-known phenomenon of hallucination, which can happen to people when they eat certain tainted foods. The question of aliens is worth considering seriously because we do know that life is possible (look in the mirror), we know under what conditions if can form (look outside; we have a planet to study that formed life), and now we know that lots of other planets are out there, and some of them may very well be similar to our own. If we can evolve here, it's quite possible some other beings evolved elsewhere under similar conditions. And with many billions of stars out there (just in our galaxy and nearby ones), the probability of other planets existing with conditions similar to ours is high. Furthermore, as our ability to detect exoplanets improves, it's quite possible we may detect signs of alien life: radio signals, industrial emissions in their atmosphere, weird starlight patterns indicating a possible Dyson swarm, etc. There's no way to detect any kind of god (whether it's one from some old book or the Q).

tbabb 10y ago

What is the process by which "samples" are drawn from the population of intelligent beings? This is a keystone of the article's argument, but it entirely hand-waved. It is not as if "intelligences" are created in the void and then assigned with some random distribution (uniform or otherwise) to bodies on planets-- each intelligent being in the universe is itself with probability 1.

Houshalter 10y ago

This strikes me as very similar to the simulation argument. That is most beings probably exist in simulations, and therefore you are far more likely to exist in a simulation than be a living person. Or similar anthropic arguments could be made about many things. You are more likely to be living in a bigger country, you are more likely to be living in the period of time where Earth's population is the largest, etc.