To distill the most important point of Sandberg, Drexler and Ord’s paper:
The Fi term has such massive uncertainty that given our state of knowledge, anything from hundreds of millions of years to greater than 10^200 years are reasonably possible, and since we don’t know much about abiogenesis, there is a reasonable chance that abiogenesis takes way longer than people think, and thus the most likely great filter is “We’ve way overestimated how easy abiogenesis can actually happen.”
The headline conclusion is that there’s a 39%-85% that we are alone in the observable universe.
IMO the major takeaways from the paper is the following:
We should mostly ignore aliens in our scenarios, since they most likely don’t exist.
We should be pretty hopeful, as there’s no great future filter, at least assuming X-risk is avoided in this millennium.
Our civilization is special in that if we collapse or go extinct, no one else of moral value will take over the universe to make it aligned with their values. That is, the universe will continue it’s natural course iff we go extinct or collapse hard enough.
To distill the most important point of Sandberg, Drexler and Ord’s paper:
The Fi term has such massive uncertainty that given our state of knowledge, anything from hundreds of millions of years to greater than 10^200 years are reasonably possible, and since we don’t know much about abiogenesis, there is a reasonable chance that abiogenesis takes way longer than people think, and thus the most likely great filter is “We’ve way overestimated how easy abiogenesis can actually happen.”
The headline conclusion is that there’s a 39%-85% that we are alone in the observable universe.
IMO the major takeaways from the paper is the following:
We should mostly ignore aliens in our scenarios, since they most likely don’t exist.
We should be pretty hopeful, as there’s no great future filter, at least assuming X-risk is avoided in this millennium.
Our civilization is special in that if we collapse or go extinct, no one else of moral value will take over the universe to make it aligned with their values. That is, the universe will continue it’s natural course iff we go extinct or collapse hard enough.