>The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference.
My statistics chops might just not be up to snuff, but the authors are ultimately just choosing their own numbers (probability distributions in this case) and plugging them in like everyone else.
We still don't know the values of those parameters. The Fermi paradox exists only given "optimistic" guesses for those parameters. The authors choose "pessimistic" distributions and declare the problem "dissolved".
Another point that I don't see addressed much is the possibility that interstellar travel may just simply be impossible: that building machines that can travel to other stars, let alone ones that are capable of hosting a colonization process, are just simply not within the realm of materials that can actually exist.
But I think the whole Fermi Paradox is a bit chauvinistic. It's assuming all life is like us, and ending in a colonisation explosion. Like our way is the only possible way.
Maybe other aliens do manage to reach a balance with their environment instead of screwing it all up like we are doing? After all, never-ending growth is simply impossible. It always reminds me of Agent Smith's speech from the matrix :)
But we as humanity have a habit of defining things around us in our own terms. We thought earth had to be the centre of the universe. Perhaps here we're also wrong and most life is just not like us?
why? if the filter is "move from unicellular to multicellular" it would have wiped out life on Mars but Earth somehow made it. It shows there's at least one step behind us which is "hard" (while showing there's another one which is "easy").
So per definition the great filter has to be in front of us as long as we wouldn't be able to find ourselves.