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168 points julienchastang | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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jmyeet ◴[] No.43712152[source]
This is your daily reminder that if we do indeed discover life so close (~120 LY) to Earth, it's an incredibly bad sign for us. This is an exercise in Bayesian reasoning.

Imagine there are 2 planets in the Milky Way where life has developed. The odds are incredibly low they're next to each other, assuming a random distribution. So it's way more likely that there are more than 2. Imagine a sphere of radius 60 LY (120/2). Our Earth is the center of one. This planet is another. That's a volume of 10^6 LY^3. The Milky Way volume (from Google) is ~17T LY^3 so there'd be roughly 170M such spheres in our galaxy.

Now imagine if the odds of simple life becoming intelligent life that we could detect and could become spacefaring is 1 in 1 million. There'd be ~170 such civilization in the Milk Way.

We have absolutely no evidence of this So simple life is a lot less common, intelligent life is a lot less likely or, and this is the scary part, something tends to wipe out sentient civilizations and that's likely in our future.

In Fermi Paradox terms, we call this a Great Filter.

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1. kjkjadksj ◴[] No.43712957[source]
A lot of assumptions are made here about intelligent life with the great filter ideas. Intelligent life is not a fundamental phase of matter. It took a random walk over billions of years to end up there, with any point potentially leading to a deviation and entirely different outcome. Take the number of bacteria dividing over the last 4 billion years on earth to one and there’s your rate of intelligent life in the universe based on what we’ve seen on earth. Are there even that many planets or bodies in the galaxy for what a billion to the power of a billion to one odds or whatever absurd number this is?