Ah, yeah, good point, especially since the whole point of the grabby aliens model is that the durations of hard steps are influenced very strongly by survivorship bias.
Scratch my quantitative claims, though I’m still confused because the time for abiogenesis is an actual hard step in the past that has anything at all to do with evolution (and looking at it gives you one datapoint for estimating the number of hard steps in general, since with N hard steps each hard step takes 1/N of the time from planetary formation to civilisation on average), while the time for a planet to become uninhabitable due to its star’s lifecycle is unrelated and just seems to be about the right order of magnitude for our civilisation and star in particular.
Ah, yeah, good point, especially since the whole point of the grabby aliens model is that the durations of hard steps are influenced very strongly by survivorship bias.
Scratch my quantitative claims, though I’m still confused because the time for abiogenesis is an actual hard step in the past that has anything at all to do with evolution (and looking at it gives you one datapoint for estimating the number of hard steps in general, since with N hard steps each hard step takes 1/N of the time from planetary formation to civilisation on average), while the time for a planet to become uninhabitable due to its star’s lifecycle is unrelated and just seems to be about the right order of magnitude for our civilisation and star in particular.
EDIT: Daniel Eth explains why: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JdjxcmwM84vqpGHhn/great-filter-hard-step-math-explained-intuitively