Re: SPACE: SIRTF survey

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Aug 24 2003 - 17:00:48 MDT

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    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



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