Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

An interesting paper that I don't see brought up often enough is "Dissolving the Fermi Paradox" by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord[0]. They show that it isn't a surprise that we are alone in the universe if we consider the uncertainty inherent to parameters of the Drake equation. Their analysis estimate that there is (at least) a 39% chance that we are alone in the observable universe. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

Moving from point estimates to distributions is great progress. It reminds me of this great paper that highlights how much information we're losing when we're only looking at means or assume everything is normally distributed. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf

One approach is to give each variable a probability distribution. The greater our uncertainty about possible values, the wider the bell curve. Drexler and colleagues did that, and found "a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable." https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

One problem with the Fermi paradox is that the Drake equation simply multiplies expected values together without regard to the underlying distributions. You can think about it this way: what if the actual mechanisms of the evolution of life result in there being a very high probability of 1 or 2 space-faring civilisations evolving, and a tiny probability of trillions of space-faring civilisations? The expected value coming out of the Drake equation would be large but useless. A few years ago some researchers at the Future of Humanity institute explored what happens if you take distributions into account. It turns out that this makes a surprising difference and results in a substantial probability of no other intelligent life. No need for speculation about great filters, predatory civilisations, etc... . The paper is freely available on ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404

This is neat! If you enjoy the write up, you might be interested in the paper “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” which goes even more on-depth into actually multiplying the probability density functions instead of the common point estimates. It has the somewhat surprising result that we may just be alone. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

This question has been (very unsatisfyingly) answered, or at least resolved: > When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 SSC has an article on the paper as well https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-disso...

What about the scenario that Humans are the First ? Once-in-a-galaxy rare (more like once in a visible universe rare; see: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf ) The more I understand how we got life from chemicals (it truly is nothing short of miraculous, even if you like I do not believe in supernatural beginnings), the more I come away with how unlikely it is that we are here. But, here we are! And, so, WE get to populate the galaxy and maybe other galaxies with our Humanity. Lucky us. There are plenty of other scenarios (they are hiding; they are waiting until we develop Warp Drive, whatever), but applying Occam's Razor says: WE are the first intelligent species in this part of the Universe. And, as a consequence, WE have a chance of using all these atoms out there for our purposes. To me, this awesome responsibility trumps Little Green Men and their supposed machines populating the galaxies.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but this seems to get the Fermi Paradox backwards. It explains why we haven't been visited by aliens (the light-cone of our radio transmissions is small and therefore aliens outside of it couldn't send probes to us), but the key observation of the Fermi Paradox is in the other direction; why can't _we_ see _other_ civilizations, in all of the billions of years of history in our light-cone? If extra-terrestrial civilizations exist, we expect to be able to see some trace of them with our telescopes. Particularly at Kardashev type II and above (star-scale structures like Dyson Spheres). Fortunately if you fix the Drake equation, the paradox dissolves: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404.

"Dissolving the Fermi Paradox": https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 >The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference.

We flipped a coin, and it ended up being heads (just us), meh... Nothing more to it: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf I believe the TLDR of that is, if you monte carlo the drake equation, and account for the uncertainty of the error margins, you don't really end up with much of a paradox.

One paper on the Fermi Paradox I want to plug is this one by Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 Most people when doing the Fermi estimate for the number of civilizations in the Galaxy use numbers that tend to result in a lot of them. But different people use very different numbers in different steps. If you look at the ranges of values that different people assign to the different terms then suddenly it doesn't seem very unlikely that intelligent civilizations could be rare.

Under some models, there’s a non-negligible chance that humans are atypical. See this paper by Sanders, Drexler, and Ord, for instance. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf

The Fermi Paradox is not real if you consider the massive uncertainty we have on the parameters of the Drake equation: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Toby Ord > "This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe" https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

The Fermi Paradox has essentially been resolved: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 This explanation is much more plausible than a Great Filter. Here's a great comment summarizing the argument very intuitively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562439 I also found this one very helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17564379

When realistic distributions of uncertainty are applied to the Drake Equation, the paradox dissolves: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

Because there are a lot of other things necessary for life. Usually we get the 'planet X may be suitable for life' PR news item first, and later in the scientific press we find out quietly 'planet X is awash in deadly gamma radiation, and the tectonics are such that there's a richter scale 13 quake every week'. It turns out that when taking into account all known factors, us being alone is a nontrivial possibility: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf

I agree with much else said here about the failure -> crank -> taboo problem, but it bears noting that the Fermi paradox is not really a paradox. There is this https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 . The 2 minute layman's version is that multiplying several to many very uncertain numbers "drives your error bars to the fringes". So, there is not some credible, high probability estimate that we are not (EDIT: locally) alone. Without that estimate there is no paradox.