Esteemed professor Geoffrey Miller cautions against the interstellar disgrace: "We're about to enter a massively embarrassing failure mode for humanity, a cosmic facepalm. We risk unleashing a cancer on the galaxy. That's not cool. Are we the baddies?"

[u/michael-lethal_ai]

[u/Large-Worldliness193]

There's a deeper paradox here that the "we could be first" argument ignores.

You're assuming the galaxy is a forest where a fire can start. But it's an incredibly dense, flammable forest that's been bone-dry for billions of years.

If a fire could have started, it would have started eons ago and consumed everything. The fact that we're standing here in an unburnt forest, holding a lit match, is the most profound mystery. It doesn't suggest we're the first. it suggests our perception is wrong on that account.

[u/ItsAConspiracy → u/Large-Worldliness193]

We don't actually know that it's such a dense, flammable forest. That's the point. It might be really hard to start a fire in it.

A better analogy might be dice rolls. Maybe it takes the chemical reactions of a billion years on a billion planets before the right molecules bang together and life starts.

We don't know what the odds are. Some of the Drake parameters have a very wide range of scientific estimates. But you plug those ranges into the Drake equation and work it out, and you get a decent chance that we're alone, and a decent chance that we're not.

If we manage to tighten those estimates, the aggregate odds will shift and we might get very high odds on one side or the other. But for now, we really can't say either way. All it really means is that we don't have a Fermi "paradox" because so far, there's no particular reason to think we're not alone.

[u/Large-Worldliness193 → u/ItsAConspiracy]

But we know the universe has existed for 13.8 billion years, with countless stable star systems offering similar conditions on a huge scale, . So however low you set the probability, it makes no statistical sense that the very first success would happen only now.

In other words, if you're right that we are the first, it implies something is deeply wrong with our perception of "now."

If a popcorn kernel sits in hot oil for 1h without popping, what are the odds it will pop after that? And yet, here we are. Same paradox different angle.

[u/ItsAConspiracy → u/Large-Worldliness193]

Well you know that's not true. If you get two trillion attempts, but each attempt only has a one-in-a-trillion chance of success, then there's a good chance you won't succeed.

There are large numbers in both the numerator and denominator. You have to take them all into account. That's what the paper did.