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Comment by raducu | Hacker News Reader

Actually Fermi's paradox makes total sense to me:

- Presume that even with something like travel at 1% o speed of light, the Milky Way is colonizable in a couple of million years.

- Presume that we are not special at all and there exist more technological advanced civilizations that predate us by at least a couple million years

- Presume such a large scale colonization would be easy to observe

If you accept the 3 presuppositions, the only logical conclusion is that there are no other technologically advanced species in the Milky Way or that we're the first(very unlikely).

Or you can choose to attack any of the presuppositions, but that's also very hard in my humble oppinion.

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> Presume that even with something like travel at 1% o speed of light, the Milky Way is colonizable in a couple of million years.

You're not assuming that it is, you're assuming that if it can be, it must be.

Which assumes that every part of the milky way is equally amenable to colonization, as if the galaxy were merely points laid out on a Cartesian grid, and that any species capable of colonizing one star must continue to colonize them all.

You must consider the case of technologically advanced species incapable of colonizing other stars, and technologically advanced species capable of colonizing other stars, but unwilling to do so on a large scale, or attempts at large scale colonization which fail across a scale of millions of years or even attempts to hide the obvious presence of such colonization from observers.

>Presume that we are not special at all and there exist more technological advanced civilizations that predate us by at least a couple million years

Ok.

>Presume such a large scale colonization would be easy to observe

By humans, given that we only recently became aware that extrasolar planets are even a thing, and have only been studying the universe with anything but optical telescopes for less than a century, and don't even know what the signs of "large scale colonization" would look like. No. Why?

>Or you can choose to attack any of the presuppositions, but that's also very hard in my humble oppinion.

Any argument can seem airtight when you refuse to consider more than a single case to be valid.

But it only takes one advanced civilization to do it. And we're probably only a century away from being able to spam the entire galaxy with probes, if we wanted to say take apart Mercury and use solar panels for propulsion. The probes would be small, smart and able to replicate themselves.

> And we're probably only a century away from being able to spam the entire galaxy with probes, if we wanted to say take apart Mercury and use solar panels for propulsion. The probes would be small, smart and able to replicate themselves.

1. We're really not.

2. Solar panels obey the inverse square law. Right now, we can't even use solar panels to power probes beyond the orbit of Jupiter - let alone drive an energy-hungry ion engine.

3. Even with an ion engine, you need fuel to thrust.

4. Even if we could send them, they'd need incredibly power-hungry antennas to transmit any useful data back. See 2.

People say things like 'only 1% of c' as if it's trivial. It's only 1%! It's also 3,000 km/s. No man-made machine has ever gone faster then 16 km/s. If we tried really hard, we might hit 1% of 1% of C.

And then it would still take that probe 400 years to visit our nearest star. 10 million years to cross the galaxy.

...And then at the end of the trip, you've got to slow back down to 0% of c, if you want to do anything useful...

I find doubling your delta-v requirements to be far simpler then increasing them a hundred-fold. If we could get something to 1% of c, we could, with a bit more work, slow it down the same way.

We can't, though.

I suspect your second and third points contradictveach other.

We literally have no idea what a >10^6 more advanced civ would look like.

There’s a kind of parochialism about these arguments. They seem to assume that aliens will be flying around the galaxy communicating by radio in big metal boxes or giant rocket powered rocks looking for planets to xenoform.

But in the same way that ants can’t see a human city around them, it’s possible humans will see no evidence of an advanced civ that isn’t doing any of the things we expect technology to do.

Also, less than 5% of the universe is observable to us. The rest we're calling "dark matter" and "dark energy" because we have no idea what it is. There's a lot we don't know that billion-year-old civilizations may have figured out to use.

But that's the beauty of this calculation it just takes one splinter group of one splinter group and they could easily populate the whole galaxy in under 10-100 million years - which, being the conclusion that Fermi found, is nothing at the time scales of when our galaxy was formed.

> We literally have no idea what a >10^6 more advanced civ would look like.

Yep. We don't even have much of a clue about what our own civilization will look like a few hundred years from now, it seems insane to pretend we would know what a far more advanced alien civilization would look like. Imagine showing someone from a thousand years ago a picture of suburbia and them saying, "Nope, this place must be abandoned...no one is growing crops on the land, there are no wells around, deer and other wildlife are walking around houses without being hunted. Must be no humans there." Even just a few decades ago a lot of people thought we would be building cities under the seas by now (hey, maybe not everyone would do it - but with billions of humans, it would only take a few splinter groups).

It's also worth pointing out that even a civilization at our level existing at the nearest star would be undetectable to us in most circumstances (even in the extremely unlikely event that the timing matched up).

These can be very stupid questions; but I always ponder over it 1. Is this our assumption that extra terrestrial life will have same chemistry/ biology/ consciousness as human beings? 2. What is definition of Life and Intelligence for E.T life. The phenomenon what we call life can be completely different for E.T. being. This is more or less same as que 1 3. It seems we have also assumed that our civilisation is advanced. In terms of what? Is our definition of advancement (and also civilisation) applicable to E.T life? 4. Consider a highly advanced civilisation millions of light years away from us finds Pioneer plaques. Even after finding these plaques they don't (wish to ;-)) communicate with us... does it mean that civilisation is not sufficiently advanced?

Technologically advanced.

Meaning: likes to explore, accumulate knowledge/understanding, harness the laws of physics for its own betterment/pleasure.

> Milky Way is colonizable in a couple of million years.

I have two takes on it:

1) We don't know the possible implication of new discoveries. Well, actually we get some glimpse of it, for example with nuclear or biological weapons around, it is fairly easy to wipe out a large part of the population. The more advanced the technology becomes it seems there is a higher chance of it blowing up in our faces and us destroying ourselves. So the galaxy could be colonizable in a few million years, but any civilization headed closer to that ability, gets closer (and faster) to its own destruction as well.

> The only logical conclusion is that there are no other technologically advanced species in the Milky Way or that we're the first(very unlikely).

Given my other pessimistic take on it (1), I would say it likely there were (are) quite a few technologically advanced species, but they've wiped themselves out or will do so before the reach the ability to colonize planets in other galaxies.

2) Another take on it is these civilization have to share the same physics and chemistry that we do. And maybe there is just a limit that gets achieved and long term colonization or fast travel is just no possible. That is there are no shortcuts like wormholes, Alcubierre drives, antigravity and other such things. We've been used to seeing huge leaps in technology and science in the last 1000 years, so it's tempting to extrapolate and but maybe we are close to reaching a wall. So there are quite a few civilizations out there but they've flown probes in their own start system, now developed internet and are sharing pictures of alien cats, hanging out on their version of Facebook and watching their alien Netflix, and of course discussing their equivalent of Fermi's Paradox on online forums. All without a chance of ever leaving their neighborhood.

1) It takes just ONE civilization not wiping itself out to colonize the galaxy; furthermore, colonizing the galaxy is a great insurance policy against extinction

2) 1% of the speed of light is very achievable even with today's technology, it's just the(irrational) fear of nuclear reactors in space and lack of political will that keeps us from exploring interstellar travel.

We have not implemented space mining that would allow refilling those reactors in space though. Reusable landing is still very iffy.

Obviously we haven't done it yet, but that we know how is the point.

> 1) It takes just ONE civilization not wiping itself out to colonize the galaxy; furthermore, colonizing the galaxy is a great insurance policy against extinction

Why? See my other post. You provide no evidence for this claim. We currently have no plans to colonize the galaxy so why would other "advanced" civilization get this crazy idea? Birth control was invented in the 60s already.

We have Musk wanting to colonize Mars, don't you think it will take just ONE eccentric trilionaire (after the solar system is colonized) to colonize the Milky Way?

Wanting to colonize mars and actually doing it are quite different things.

1. If the chance for a huge colony to go extinct, raising the coefficient to galactic scale does not change the relative probability significantly unless you add constraints to the population dynamics. Basically you could get the same numbers for people in a colony and colonies in a galaxy. "only ONE" kinda obscures the fact that this one would be a mighty huge one.

2. On straight lines perhaps with ages long acceleration. Planning such a course might well take more than nuclear reactor, no?

1% of the speed of light with nuclear reactors? I'm skeptical. It's 3000 km/s.

Voyager 1 is already going about 17km/s. With no atmosphere or gravity to fight against you can keep accelerating as long as you have power.

No, you need a propellant even if you use a nuclear energy source.

Project Orion was supposes to reach ~10% of the speed of light by using fission bombs and could theoretically be built using 1950's technology.

There are other proposed schemes to travel at ~light speeds - light sails, nuclear fragment rockets, but I'd bet on nuclear fusion in the not so distant future.

Faster than light travel may be off the table, but I see no reason why nuclear energy alone could not get us "close" to the speed of light in the next centuries or so.

Thanks, I didn't realize they were planning for so high delta vees. They were fusion bombs in the end.

>colonizing the galaxy is a great insurance policy against extinction

I'm not so sure. The only difference between a colony ship and a kinetic world destroyer is that the colony ship slows down before it reaches its destination

The earth would easily handle the impact of any colony ship we could currently manage. Sure things are you approach the speed of light, but we can't.

I'm going to put on my sci fi glasses here and predict that the universe will suddenly blink out of existence once a scientist works on or develops something like warp speed.

... to be replaced by something even more unlikely...

Maybe, but I’d out my money on the universe blinking out of existence after someone begins a local escalation of privilege on the hardware simulating it.

- There is no reason to believe that species want to colonize the whole Milky Way. In fact, our current value and belief systems would not recommend such an expansion either. (The same for self-multiplying robot ships - if you think it's a bad idea, why would aliens think otherwise?)

- Cyclical cultures, filters, and large time frames are not properly taken into account. If you take them into account, colonization of the whole Milky Way seems unlikely.

- Life could occur only very rarely.

So basically, the missing premise is that if all of your conditions are fulfilled, then a civilization will colonize the Milky Way and has done so far enough in the past that we can easily observe it. There is no reason to think that.

Now here is the bad news: Even if we accept your original line of thought, that would still be entirely compatible with the view that some intelligent species is just about to colonize the Milky Way and just in front of our doorstep...

I'm just kidding, of course. Like others have pointed out, this "research" is almost entirely based on speculation. We don't even know how likely life would arise if all conditions for life are fulfilled, let alone whether that also means that intelligent life will arise or with which likelihood. We know nothing.

The only thing that we can say with relative certainty according to our current knowledge is that if intelligent life develops with high probability whenever the conditions for life are met, then it is a bit harder to detect then we thought or Xenoarchaeology will be booming some day in the future.

> In fact, our current value and belief systems would not recommend such an expansion either.

This just isn't true. There are current value and belief systems, even ones held by people with a relative large amount of political and economic power, that do in fact recommend such an expansion (someday).

I would say it's the dominant value system, given that our global economy and energy consumption grows by around 2% per year, with no serious efforts to change that.

It's worth pointing out that for developed economies like the US, UK, and Japan, the amount of per capita energy usage is the lowest it has been in decades:

https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/0784d9d63336606d4ca025...

This may be at least in part due to the shifting of energy-intensive industries to countries like China, but it does show that countries can continue to grow their GDP (per capita) while dropping their energy usage per capita, which bodes well for the future.

> There is no reason to believe that species want to colonize the whole Milky Way.

There are definitely reasons to believe that.

You certainly don't want to be in a galaxy where someone else does it first: if you can't coëxist with them, you're probably going to be wiped out.

Large-scale projects like Dyson spheres would, I imagine, require vast resources taken from multiple solar systems. So even if you're not colonizing every star, you're probably mining from many of them.

Anyway, just a couple of reasons that spring to mind. Given our data set is exactly one intelligent civilization it's hard to draw conclusions, but expansionist pressure seems to be the safe assumption.

> You certainly don't want to be in a galaxy where someone else does it first: if you can't coëxist with them, you're probably going to be wiped out.

Why the pessimism? We do know that we currently do not have any plans for massive expansion through the whole Milky Way, and even if we made such plans, we would definitely include safe zones and ample space for other species we might encounter. If we are that good, maybe other species are no less good? That's not an unreasonable assumption, though ultimately anthropocentric, of course.

But the point I was trying to make was different. I should have said "There is not enough reason". There are just as many hypothetical reasons for as there are against. We really don't know.

>expansionist pressure seems to be the safe assumption.

Then again, the universe is very, very large...

> and even if we made such plans, we would definitely include safe zones and ample space for other species we might encounter

We haven't really done such a great job on or own planet. What makes you think would do any better in the stars?

> You certainly don't want to be in a galaxy where someone else does it first: if you can't coëxist with them, you're probably going to be wiped out.

Well, since the problem of even figuring out if you are alone is nontrivial why would you opt to do such a astronomical operation because of a hypothetical? We most certainly would not.

On the assumption that all other civilisations are either hundreds of millions of years ahead or behind you; if they are hundeds of million years more advanced, they surely already know of your existance and if they had any hostile intentions you wouldn't even exist, while if they are behind you, they are at your mercy after you aquired all the resources in the galaxy.

This is the first I've ever heard in my life that intelligent species wouldn't want to spread to the stars. Given the historical impetuous of our species to expand to every even remotely habitable region of Earth, and large support for living off the planet if it were possible, why would you think aliens would be the same? Every single living organism on this planet fights constantly to expand it habitable zone.

Probably the best reasons to spread out are: a) As insurance against Earth 0 getting blown up by a passing asteroid, and/or b) You found someplace better.

Possibility (b) seems at least somewhat unlikely, given that we (at least) evolved over millions of years to the very particular conditions of Earth 0. So finding somewhere 'better' would likely involve some gene-gineering to adapt, and maybe involve a shallower gravity well than we currently inhabit.

Possibility (a) is a really good reason to spread out a bit, but you likely don't need more than a few insurance policies... Certainly there's no need to aggressively conquer the entire galaxy: Given difficulties of communication and transport over long distances, there's likely some real question of what 'conquer' would even mean...

It occurs to me that it would be interesting to look into how much stars drift apart from one another over the course of time involved in getting from one to another. Consider that the launch window for mars comes up once every two years; what are the launch windows like for stars, where travel might take hundreds or thousands of years? Maybe it takes a thousand years to get a scouting run done, and then it's infeasible to follow up with an actual colony ship...

If you have the ability to live in space long enough to cover the vast distances between stars, why would you bother colonizing planets at all? Pretty much all the raw material you need is readily available in asteroids without having to deal with a steep gravity well or a thick atmosphere, and the star itself will give you plenty of energy to work with.

Pretty much every star system becomes habitable if you don't have to care about whether or not it has a planet that meets your species's environmental needs.

Only if gravity isn't a requirement of life. We know that bad things happen to humans when in low/zero-g for more than a month. What happens to when we are talking about lifetimes - science is exploring this topic but doesn't really have answers.

> We know that bad things happen to humans when in low/zero-g for more than a month.

This is mainly because humans are adapted to live standing upright in gravitational conditions, with a pressure gradient across their body. If you take animals which are not adapted for this (e.g. large invertebrates from the sea) they're crushed by their own weight when taken out of a buoyant environment.

Even so, that doesn't make it infeasible to live in space for long periods of time. Artificial gravity can be generated with a centrifuge.

However, I would say it's likely that gravity is necessary for life similar to what we are familiar with to form in the first place. Earth's gravity facilitates the existence of dense fluids, allowing for the complex reactions of primordial life.

A civilization advanced enough to colonize other star systems likely 1) is advanced enough to tweak their genetics to deal with low/zero gravity 2) is advanced enough to build a ship with artificial gravity (we came up with this idea long ago, go watch "2001", it's not hard).

Because controlling all of the resources of the galaxy, or at least having that option, shields your civilization from other less civilized/hostile civilizations?

The third premise is its downfall, though.

A WW1 wireless operator of only 100 years ago wouldn't be able to detect modern spread-spectrum military radios, let alone separate encrypted signals from the noise.

Why should we suppose we could detect a civilisation two million years more advanced?

I think the point is that they would have colonised Earth already. It is comparing the age of the Earth (billions of years) to the size of the galaxy (100kly)

Or maybe the value of colonising a planet relative to the cost just does't make it worth it by the time you have the technology to try.

Maybe every advanced civilisation ends up turning inwards to simulations rather than outwards. Maybe there are aliens all around us, but we can't notice them, because we're living in someones phone, in the latest top-hit: SimHumans5000.

There's quite literally an infinite number of possibilities where we're not alone after all, and part of the problem is that we don't just not know the values to plug into the relevant probability calculations, but we don't even know all the variables.

An inwards turning civilization would be much more incentivised to collect all the matter they can since E=mc^2, and for them E is their lifespan.

For a civilization living for trillions upon trilions of years inside a simulation, intergalactic latancy is just a blink of an eye -- they have no reason not to distribute their simulation across the galaxy.

All of the burning stars would be just lost time for such a civilization

> I think the point is that they would have colonised Earth already.

Not saying I believe this, but are we sure they haven’t? There’s a bunch of fringe people who believe it did happen.

What would be the point of an alien ship travelling across the galaxy contacting just a select group of loonies?

Sorry, guess I wasn’t clear. There’s folks who think intelligent life on earth could’ve been caused by alien life splicing genes with pre-existing species on the planet. Still rather loony, just in a different way than the abducted folks.

We can see our commen ancestry with all life on earth. So not unless their idea of colonization was dropping some primitive microbial life from space.

>If you accept the 3 presuppositions, the only logical conclusion is that there are no other technologically advanced species in the Milky Way or that we're the first(very unlikely).

Or they have a culture/value system that doesn't care about sprawling out to occupy as much space as possible. Why is it presumed that advanced alien civilizations would use their technology to maximize, rather than minimize their ecological footprint?

It stands to reason that environmental degradation could be one of the major filtering mechanisms for advanced life and any civilization that clears the filter will need to have fostered sustainable, symbiotic production systems rather than extractive ones.

Game theory basically. Any civilizations that minimizes would be destroyed by any civ that maximizes, so the survivors must be maximizers. Furthermore any civ that minimizes would never get to an advanced stage in the first place.

>Any civilizations that minimizes would be destroyed by any civ that maximizes

Unless we're talking about hive-minds I don't think this premise holds at all.

Civilizations that culturally value domination and expansion can dominate within their own civilization much more easily than casting out into space to find alien ones. They're more likely to destroy themselves than others.

>the only logical conclusion is that there are no other technologically advanced species in the Milky Way or that we're the first(very unlikely).

Why is this unlikely? The likelihood of intelligent life emerging that gets far enough in their development to try to colonize a galaxy might be so low that it could easily only be once per galaxy or even rarer than that.

Think about how long multicellular life has existed on this planet and yet a very narrow band ended up 'becoming intelligent' and even then it took a long time before industrialization that finally propelled us forward.

This is not hard to attack:

> Presume such a large scale colonization would be easy to observe

There is no reason why this should be true.

More technical advanced meaning they can effectively use all resources on their own planet?

Or even further where they can effectively gather all the energy from their star?

The only reasons to branch out is because your own star is dying or your population (demand for energy) is growing too fast.

Essentially I think that population control is a big hurdle for any advanced species. Which would be the main drive for colonizing space. But at what rate does it grow? After their first star, how long does it take for the next one to be used fully.

Or they would gather all the mass they can before the heat death of the universe, since E=mc^2 and since they could live forever.

Why would a species want to colonize a galaxy? You’re talking about insane travel and communication times after all, and spreading very thin. Sticking to a single system or handful of systems while controlling reproduction rates is a solution that achieves the same ends without spreading your species so far that it amounts to a million different civilizations. At some point over such distances you’re not colonizing anything, just throwing generations into the night with no hope of a return. That same energy could be used to engineer a structure or structured for those same beings to live within a reasonable distance of each other.

The whole Fermi Paradox reasoning is flawed, because the assumptions are flawed.

P(at least one technologically advanced civilization observes itself | there exists at least one technologically advanced civilization) = 1

We will observe ourselves, no matter how it is unlikely for us to exist. We may not be special, but highly improbable and therefore the first and the only.

But such explanation isn't that interesting.

You're just stating an anthropic-principle argument here, and unfortunately anthropic arguments tend conceal a fallacy of equivocation. You can look up some of William Lane Craig's work for a formal logical analysis showing exactly where it goes wrong, but the traditional plain-language analogy is:

Imagine you're sitting in a prison cell, and you've been told you're going to be executed by a firing squad of a dozen expert marksmen, who will shoot you from a distance of only a few feet away.

You're led out of your cell, tied to a stake, the marksmen line up, they raise their rifles and aim at you, and you hear the mass bang of their simultaneous firing. And... you discover you are unharmed. All twelve expert marksmen completely missed you, at close range!

The anthropic argument says you should be completely unsurprised; after all, the only way for you to be observing the marksmen now is if they all missed, so the probability of them having missed, given that you are observing them, is 1. We should not be surprised by something which has probability 1.

While this is trivially true, it is also utterly unconvincing and utterly pointless. You are perfectly justified in being surprised that all the marksmen missed, and here is the equivocation: the anthropic argument tells you not to be surprised, but the thing it tells you not to be surprised at is not the thing that was actually surprising. Your prior for all the marksmen missing and leaving you completely unharmed should have been very, very low, and no amount of ex-post-facto wrangling can change that.

Or, put more simply, anthropic arguments can be used to launder any past event to a probability of 1; after all, the probability of event X having happened, given that you observed event X, is always trivially 1. But it tells you nothing useful whatsoever.

> the probability of them having missed, given that you are observing them, is 1. We should not be surprised by something which has probability 1. While this is trivially true, it is also utterly unconvincing and utterly pointless.

It's completely convincing to me. If you are unharmed, no single bullet hit you. Even if you've had the "prior" information like that they are "a firing squad of a dozen expert marksmen" if you are "utterly surprised" by the result it probably means that your priors simply miss something, not that it couldn't have happened at all. E.g. maybe that dozen of experts had some additional decision you didn't know about, e.g. they want to influence a regime change and agreed before that it would start with you not being harmed.

Such kind of information turns very improbable event to very probable.

More than that, even improbable events do happen all the time. It is very improbable that I personally will never win a huge prize on the lottery ticket, but the lotteries are intentionally made that somebody from time to time wins it. If we are a "lottery winner" and don't know anything about the rules of the lottery and the number of the participants, we just can't conclude anything else about the lottery probabilities than that we got what we got. As long as more different universes are possible, no matter how we think our is improbable, as long as we have information only about our state we don't have to be able to conclude more than that we have what we have.

So there's no value is empty talk, we know more only by moving the boundaries of what we can measure. We have actually have learned amazingly much about the Universe, but there's no "guaranteed first prize win" ("learning everything") in these endeavors.

Such kind of information turns very improbable event to very probable.

The issue is, as I pointed out, that it works for anything and produces the same result. Anthropic arguments literally consist of stating that "P(A|A) = 1". Which of course is true, but what does that actually tell you?

> The issue is, as I pointed out, that it works for anything

If you find it used "for anything" you can point to such cases where it is improperly used. When it is used for the case where we genuinely don't have enough information to claim any "probability" then it is simply a more colorful statement of that fact: that there is really nothing actually measured and known based on which any other statement than "we know exactly one example that such outcome is possible because we live in this outcome" is honestly impossible.

You may psychologically not like that fact, but when there is no more data, it has to be admitted that there is no more data to claim anything else than that. Maybe the following can help you: Imagine you find yourself in the middle of the desert, in all directions you see only sand. People today know that every desert ends somewhere, but that's based on the fact that enough people don't live in the middle of the desert, so you must imagine that you are the very first person that ever existed and that you find yourself in the middle of the desert. While moving around the place, looking for any signs, you may or may not find the proofs about something else in the distance. But you can genuinely be in the phase where you see only sand and can't conclude anything about the existence of, for example, the rivers or the sees.

The way I see it, the message is not "give up any attempt to learn more about the Universe you are in" the message should be "sitting around and inventing stories doesn't help: you have to move and actively search to find out more." The humanity was for a while good in inventing stories that sounded comforting but were completely unsupported, but we have actually in the last 100 years found the exact and provable signs about much more of our Universe than ever in our history: think about it: 100 years ago nobody knew that there exists anything more than one galaxy: ours. Today we can actually claim that there are one hundred billion galaxies in our Universe. And that most of them move away from ours. And we can calculate very precisely when all of them were on "one place": around 13.8 billion years ago. I'm always so glad that I live in this point of history to be even able to learn about that.(1)

If you want more answers, support the science which looks for the answers -- there have to be serious investments in the real experiments for finding out more because easily reachable information is already found. And the humanity sadly invests more in military equipment than in science. And a lot of what we've learned we have learned from the projects that are less "sexy": you don't have to have many humans walking on the moon to learn more about the moon, for example: using robotic probes is all that we need today.

But you should also not realistically expect the answers that are behind the limits of what's reachable for us. In the example of the first human in the desert, he can reach some land behind the desert, but being just a first human, walking there, he surely won't walk on the moon. He can however look at the moon and the changes in the shades from the sun on different places on the Earth and develop the idea that the Earth is also round. And that's how scientific discovery works: carefully doing enough experiments to be able to conclude something that was before unknown.

1) to reestablish the perspective for the day-to-day events, search for "Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy"

Anthropic "answers" are used precisely to tell people they should "give up any attempt to learn more". They proclaim trivially that since X happened, the probability of X having happened is 1, therefore there is nothing in need of further explanation, so would you please stop now?

I should mention at this point that my degree is in philosophy, and my thesis was on the argument from design post-Darwin. Much of it consisted of exploring how various people -- not at all religious people! -- have been struck by the seeming improbability of our universe full of complex structured arrangements of matter and energy (including us) and sought explanations beyond "God must have done it". I had to read Barrow and Tipler's door-stopper of a book on the anthropic principle as part of that, along with criticisms of anthropic arguments, and came away convinced that the anthropic principle is at best a tautology possessing no explanatory power.

> would you please stop now? I should mention at this point that my degree is in philosophy

That explains, thank you.

> Anthropic "answers" are used precisely to tell people they should "give up any attempt to learn more".

I don’t see any support for that claim and I claim the opposite and I’ve already elaborated my claim.

Anthropic arguments are brought up when someone notices the seeming improbability of the universe we observe around us, and whenever someone suggests that it's worth digging into that to figure out if there's a deeper reason for it. Why, out of all the possible values they could have taken, did the fundamental constants of our universe take the specific values we observe, and which happen to give rise to complex accumulations of matter and energy?

We know of nothing -- yet -- to suggest those particular values were necessary. We know that even tiny changes to those values produce a very different universe in which significant accumulations of matter and energy don't occur.

So the particular universe we observe around us appears to be staggeringly improbable.

The anthropic argument says "well, we observe it, therefore it happened, therefore don't bother digging any more because that explains that". And it's incredibly unsatisfying.

(I should note Barrow and Tipler did go further and proposed a variety of anthropic principles, some of which border on religious, but I'm talking here mainly about the base anthropic argument, as trotted out way back at the start of this comment chain)

There are people who look for deeper theories in which the particular conditions we observe do fall out as necessary. There are people who work on multiverse theories where it's inevitable that at least some universes will have conditions amenable to complex accumulations of matter (and thus to conscious observers). There are even people who've gone way out there proposing theories of natural selection applied at the level of whole universes, where arrangements of the constants that help a universe "reproduce" more (usually through forming singularities) are also coincidentally ones which require complex accumulations of matter.

There's a whole wealth of things out there to think about and explore. But anthropic arguments tell us to just shrug our shoulders, say it's totally unsurprising that a seemingly-so-unlikely thing happened, and stop trying to explore.

(and, of course, they do it in a away that's suspect from both a logical and a probability standpoint)

> the particular universe we observe around us appears to be staggeringly improbable

Says who? Anybody who knows what he really talks about will tell you that there aren’t any real physical data to claim any “probability” at all to the physical constants we observe. Let me repeat: you can’t use “probability” for that in mathematical or physical sense. That’s all.

Also please quote who actually says that doing experiments to learn more should not be done. If somebody just says that some philosophers talk about something they don’t undestand, and that there isn’t enough data from the experiments we’ve already done to say more, that’s what I can imagine.

Says who?

Ah, you've got me. Literally no-one in the history of humanity has ever suggested that the particular configuration of our universe, suitable for the formation of complex accumulations of matter, is surprising, improbable or unlikely. I completely fabricated that notion, which had never before been expressed by any person, from whole cloth.

Or, you know... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe for an introduction and some bibliography. If and when you eventually come round to the idea that perhaps this is something people have thought, talked, and argued about, we can continue from there, but I'm having an extremely difficult time assuming good faith on your part right now.

Incidentally, some of your other questions about whether anyone has ever at any point in history said or done something with respect to anthropic arguments will be touched on even in that introductory Wikipedia article.

“Fine tuned” doesn’t mean “highly improbable” in mathematical or physical sense, because probability is defined only as a limit value in case the number of trials is infinite. Once you have only one outcome there is simply no "improbable" probability. Check your sources if they understand that much.

“Fine tuned” claimed by some people is currently only a metaphysical claim: “IF we believe that the physical constants can take any value, then only some exact constants define the Universe with the characteristics like ours.” Note if. There’s no real evidence for that belief, that all the values are/were actually possible. We don’t know if there’s something outside of the results of our current experiments that can support such claim, but given what we exactly know, there’s also no real reason to believe that the other constants were possible.

Note: we also have absolutely zero of exact evidence that multiverses exist. So what we actually have is only this Universe of ours, with only the constants that we observe.

To paraphrase one joke, if you only saw only one sheep, looking black, through you window in your whole life, moving from left to right, the only valid mathematical and physical claim you can make is "there exists at least one sheep there, whose one side is black." Nothing more unless you make more observations. It's basic scientific literacy.

Or to paraphrase another example: you've just went to your search machine and typed "seinfeld license plate picture." You've received the image of the plate on which is "new york assman." Then you go around saying "imagine, from all combinations that I can imagine that the license plates can have, I've got exactly this one. It's so improbable." No, it isn't. Sorry to burst your bubble. Now imagine a relaxed experiment: You live in New York, go outside your door, wait for the first car to pass by. You never saw any license plate in your life, or got any information how they are issued. Then you go out and see the license plate "BGY 3891." You say again "oh look, from all the license plates in New York, if I assume they can have 7 letters and digits, how 'improbable' it is for me to see exactly BGY 3891." Again, in that experiment, there's no mathematical probability involved. You simply observed one license plate. You can invent "fine tuning" story about it, of course: imagine, if the Earth wouldn't exist, there would be no humans, there would be no cars, there would be no license plates, there would be no me making the experiment. Yes. But given all that actually exists, and that you actually went and observed one plate, it's simply the first (the only) license plate you saw.

I've also generated a number of random bytes, hex encoded, which can be observed as one big number:

4ad41f5650977f991bb1b1a12a29f1cefe1e6ffede 8bb7d71ab0199832ca60345236ca343a0e3aff02fc 8b8a6d24aef012b3b15e688f3bcd7d82a77e3f0e35 6745b1a6d4bcd1fc90ff4e3ee273cb1f0989fa140a b0a932252e9bf2ac3198b3bb7446a738d252233861 8ba380465181f544d900f8cc20b1544b6022f05bc5 266917d2ef5a8f6afe41245862b66c3c3f1874df84 c3bf6c4362455e2c4c66d08be68c1b1a0ab073619a c5626e7719c4bc75d96ebb42daee9f147fe60aae71 85a482939c62ded6e05ac9728e7edf65c97c868535 63f697a45e75d325824e4bea051c1c3781fa284d86

And wow there are 10 to 556 (1 with 556 zeroes) possible numbers that big, and I've got exactly that one! Isn't it amazing? Hint: it isn't.

You asked "Says who?"

I provided some examples.

You obviously don't agree with the argument, but not that long ago you were pretty obviously questioning whether anyone had ever even made the argument. Did you make sure to call and check for buried cables before digging the new holes to move those goalposts into?

I actually asked: ""the particular universe we observe around us appears to be staggeringly improbable"<--Says who?" Don't omit your words I quoted to pretend that I ask something else.

I questioned the use of "improbable" by anybody who knows what "improbable" in mathematical sense means and uses it in that way about the "universe we observe" giving any exact evidence. I still haven't seen such an example. I don't care about these who don't want to even understand what they talk about, or those who make claims with no actual support. My question was with the goal to point to exactly that: those who claim actually don't have any physical evidence for their claims. The wikipedia article mentions "theists," "philosophers," "theologians" etc. Some scientists also write something on the subject but not with the actual scientific support, just in their role of some of the above.

The number of random people claiming something doesn't make the claim more true. The validity of physical claims can be evaluated only based on the physical evidence, and only processed according to the mathematical rules that are valid in our Universe. Anything else is not physics.

Once in a time, there was one constant that physicists talked about as "special" (in that non-physical sense) being at that moment "exactly" 137, according to the best measurements of the moment. It was measured much more precisely since. 137.0359. Then 137.03599. Then 137.035999. Wow, isn't it something special? Maybe it's exactly 137.036? Does it have some special "meaning"? But now we know using much more precise measurements that it's 137.035999139... So it turned out to be quite unspectacular.

What is spectacular is that we have so precise measurements today: for that constant we are uncertain only for "0.23 parts per billion." And by the way, whichever computer or mobile phone you use now, the CPU in it has the basis of 99.9999999% pure silicon. That's also spectacular, it's one grain (i.e. 1 gram) of dirt in 1000 tons of silicon (at least 12 railroad cars needed)! And because it is also a result of a lot of hard work, and available to everybody including "theists" and "philosophers."

Thanks for in depth explanation why this idea isn't interesting.

> But it tells you nothing useful whatsoever.

Exactly. Existence of our civilization is not an evidence for the high probability of life emergence, nor for the low probability of that.

And the lack of observations of extraterrestrial civilizations is evidence for low probability of life emergence.

In probability theory there's the concept of a filtration.

Rigorously speaking, probabilities are not attributed to singular events, but to sets (possibly, in the discrete case, single-element sets such as {heads}, {tails}).

To be even more precise: a sigma-algebra is a concept of set-of-all-sets that avoids continuous-case paradoxes through technical stuff you can ignore.

A filtration is a decreasing sequence of sigma algebras: for example, if your event space is the six numbers a die might show, you could have

F(0) = { {}, {die number is odd}, {die number is even}}

and

F(1) = { {}, {die number is 1},...{die number is 6}, {die number is 1 or 2},...} (a sigma algebra is closed under intersections)

What this means is that earlier probabilities are defined on coarser spaces of sets of events as compared to later probabilities. This is how you get dynamic stochastic processes that don't look into the future.

> Presume that even with something like travel at 1% o speed of light, the Milky Way is colonizable in a couple of million years

Imagine an intergalactic astro physicist raising three eye brows, wondering, "only?!"

Why would another species be millions of years ahead of us in development?

Because the universe is pretty old and planets similar to Earth but much older are probably abundant.

The solar system formed, apparently, 4.6 billion years ago. The universe itself is closer to 14 billion years old. Might a solar system like ours have formed, somewhere, 4.7 billion years ago instead? And once it's formed, how long does it take for life to evolve? If the earth had 10% more surface area, would evolution have occurred 10% faster? There were various huge extinction events during the life of the earth, at least one of which appears to be due to a collision with a giant asteroid; if that happened 70 million years ago instead of 65 million, would humans have evolved a few million years earlier?

The point is that, if you rolled the dice on a new universe that had a decent chance of producing something like our Earth, there are lots of sources of variance, such that the "95% confidence interval" during which something like us might have evolved is probably hundreds of millions of years wide. Given that, the chance that two independent civilizations would reach a particular level of technological development during the same million-year period is less than 1%.

Consider how long the dinosaurs were around vs the short period humans existed. If another planet managed to skip over that long delay...

Because planets suitable for life could have formed several billion years before the Earth. Our solar system is relatively recent. I don't know when rocky planets first started to form, but I've heard for at least the past 10 billion years. Also, we don't know what evolution always takes as long to result in a technological species. It could be tens of millions of years slower or faster, just depending.

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