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The Big Alien Theory

thebigalientheory.com

21 pointssimonh11 comments

> It's a complete myth that a single data point is inadequate for making predictions. For example, let's take Usain Bolt's 100m World Record of 9.58 seconds. Imagine that was the only data point we had regarding human running speed. Wth that one data point we could confidently make a powerful prediction, that anyone we pick from the world population will take more than 9.58 seconds to run 100 meters.

We have measured countless people running the 100 meter and that's why we know who is the fastest. Isn't the world record the opposite of one data point by the accumulated knowledge is contains?

It’s just an extreme example to help illustrate the point. By itself it isn’t enough to make the argument, but that’s why the author also makes the rest of the argument.

This is actually a really fun read. I agree that the standard assumptions about aliens are vastly negatively biased to the point of absurdity. Though reading this does highlight how an alternative approach may come across way too speculative for academia.

> I agree that the standard assumptions about aliens are vastly negatively biased to the point of absurdity.

could you elaborate?

The main point is unassailable, most individuals (in any category) will be from larger pools vs. small pools.

One implication I have seen mentioned before is that we are far likelier to be living in a time of high population than low. That within 95% accuracy, we are living in a time segment with 95% of humanity.

To make any sense of that, given the long future humanity could have on Earth, the chance of human extinction is great.

Given the serious challenges of any meaningful colonization of the moon, Mars or anyone else, and the number of existential threats to humanity, many of them self created (weapons, brittle dependency on tech, environmental damage, etc.) it is another reason to take collective human action toward risk mitigation much more seriously than our leaders and citizenry have done till now.

One way our civilization could continue, but numbers come down, is if artificial intelligence inherently needs less individuals. Maybe there will be no good practical reason for more than one post-human AI and economics will simply result in one, inevitably more complex and modular, intelligent individual chewing through the resources of our solar system and beyond.

That would fit with the articles conclusion that our civilization must already be on the larger population side, so any future we have must contain much fewer individuals or none? Not very reassuring - but worth considering.

The fallacy here is simple:

All of the assumptions mapping from our experiences to "alien" experiences are built on that those experiences share fundemental premises. That the demographics of alien civilizations match our own. That we are a median point and not an extreme outlier. There are even solid arguments for considering us an outlier (Fermi paradox)

Even if we take the sketchy assumptions that the sizes of alien civilizations are zipfy, we could equally reasonably assume most civilizations are smaller than us even if we are the smallest civilizations to ever exist.

The article is making the (almost explicit) assumption that the "power law" holds for civilization populations.

That seems reasonable to me.

But I think we can also find good arguments that we have more information than simply where each of us as individuals appeared.

For instance, the resources of the universe can easily support quadrillions of us (or individual entities), so if even one civilization is able to extend itself to other solar systems reliably, there must be civilizations with quadrillions or more individuals somewhere.

That would strongly imply that while most individuals are in large civilizations, we have counter evidence that we might still be not in one.

Or the argument could be that the power law doesn't hold due to a strong threshold effect, or some other effect.

For instance of some civilizations become galactic, but most individuals still appear in a great many more civilizations that die out before becoming immune to collective disasters.

In which case, I really hope we are not typical!

It’s not just assuming they match our own. The kinds of distributions we see in our civilisation (country land are distribution, population distribution, etc) are also seen in many, many other phenomena. Species ranges, species population sizes, planet and asteroid size distributions, island size distributions, mountain size distributions and many many other phenomena. All it’s assuming is that the number of a thing inversely correlates to the size of the thing. Small things tend to be numerous and big things tend to be scarce. We see this in all sorts of phenomena. Not all phenomena, but many, many.

On that basis, the argument would be that since that inverse correlation seems to be extremely common, it”s also likely to be found in the distributions of Intelligent species. Not guaranteed, but very likely. I think it’s an interesting argument.

this is a difficult article to get through.

> Aside from a disproportionately large brain, we're fairly ordinary mammals.

we're rather inadequate mammals. it is our brain in conjunction with our propensity for violence and ability to use tools that separates us, not necessarily in a good way, from other mammals.

> However we should also consider ourselves to be a member of a very different group - those species, scattered throughout the universe, which ponder the existence of life beyond their own planet.

this is wholly narcissistic. we have no evidence that other animals don't have philosophy.

> Given the vast scale of the universe, this group is likely to be even more numerous and diverse than our own animal kingdom.

no evidence for that either.

> Which begs the question: how should we expect to stack up against these other intelligent species?

that's not what "begs the question" means.

so an article going off about interpreting data and logical conclusions is a little hard to give credence to when the opening paragraph is basically sentence after sentence of non-evidentiary or incorrect statements.

> our propensity for violence

I think you’re underestimating how brutally violent many animals can be, even herbivores. Just look at what the males of many species will do in competition over females. Yes our organisational skills and automation take it to another level, but the propensity to brutalise and kill is everywhere in the natural world.

i am not underestimating it all. just because other animals are violent doesn't matter or contradict what i said. additionally, a lot of what we see in the animal world in terms of violence is fighting for food and survival. yes, nature has a lot of violence, but is often reasonable violence. other cases of it not being reasonable pale to that seen in humans, where humans showcase violence against non-competitive species and against other humans.

there is lot of evidence that homo sapiens' early dominance over other hominids was due in no small part to violence.

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