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Sarogo Gotye's avatar

Some assumptions in the model are that intelligent life is rare in that a lot of habitable worlds don't produce an intelligent space faring species even if the planet and star is perfect, as otherwise life's arrival on earth only really tells you about ~mode arrival time of life on a planet, and not relative rank. The paper the figure is from actually shows that humans aren't necessarily even 10% early, however they only manage this if the gamma ray bursts and close supernovae aren't important to habitability and ~solar like stars are almost the only type which is habitable. If you allow red dwarfs, or even K types then human beings are still really early.

I see this as a counter to the rare earth or rare intelligence hypothesis, in that even if rare, if Grabby they're still everywhere. If they're not-rare then they're still everywhere. At least that was what I gathered.

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Alien_AV's avatar

Can you detail the mechanism by which you use future events to explain current state of the universe? Or reference me to a post explaining it?

Can you contrast the following two theories?

"Life appeared on Earth at this early time because later Earth would be already taken by grabby aliens."

"Tea appeared surprisingly early in human history because in the future Starbucks is destined to monopolize all political power on Earth and destroy all samples of tea in existence, to promote coffee-drinking."

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