From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Aug 24 2003 - 17:00:48 MDT
On Sun, 24 Aug 2003, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Intuitively, the odds seem like they should be in the range of a
> thousand-to-one for any technological artifacts being spotted, so by the
> rule of calibration I'll offer a probability of 86% against.
Eliezer, can you explain why you pick 1000-1 odds? (You may want to
read my response to Robin's comments first.) This would seem to
be pulling a number out of the hat. It is beginning to look like
from the exoplanet searches that we are getting 1-in-50 solar systems
may have "Earths". Lineweaver's work suggests that *most* of them should
be much older than our "Earth". Dick's work (recently pointed out by
Anders) suggests we need to completely rethink when and where intelligence
may "live" due to the fact that much of it is much older than we are.
(I will suggest you may have conflicting investments in whether or not
there has or has not been a singularity within a single solar system
within this galaxy yet.)
So the Fermi Paradox seems in my mind to be getting *much* tougher
to resolve.
I would not disagree that our current state of technology may make
it extremely difficult to discover "artifacts". But that does not
suggest an 86% level of certainty that they are not out there (at
least to me).
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Aug 24 2003 - 17:13:46 MDT