Hm? Why doesn’t Rare Earth solve this problem? We don’t have the tech yet to examine the surfaces of exoplanets so for all we know the foreign-Earth candidates we’ve got now will end up being just as inhospitable as the rest of them. “Seemingly life capable” isn’t a very high bar at the minute.
Now, if we did have the tech, and saw a bunch of lifeless planets that as far as we know had nearly exactly the same conditions as pre-Life Earth, and people started rattling off increasingly implausible and special-pleading reasons why (“no planet yet found has the same selenium-tungsten ratio as Earth!”), then there’d be a problem.
I don’t see why you need to posit exotic scenarios when the mundane will do.
I don’t see why you need to posit exotic scenarios when the mundane will do.
Neither do I, hence my current low credence in a Great Filter and my currently high credence for, “We’re just far from the mean; sometimes that does happen, especially in distributions with high variance, and we don’t know the variance right now.”
Well I agree with you on all of that. How is it non-causal?
Or have I misunderstood and you only object to the “aliens had FOOM AI go wrong” explanations but have no trouble with the “earth is just weird” explanation?
It isn’t. The people who affirmatively believe in the Great Filter being a real thing rather than part of their ignorance are, in my view, the ones who believe in a noncausal model.
Hm? Why doesn’t Rare Earth solve this problem? We don’t have the tech yet to examine the surfaces of exoplanets so for all we know the foreign-Earth candidates we’ve got now will end up being just as inhospitable as the rest of them. “Seemingly life capable” isn’t a very high bar at the minute.
Now, if we did have the tech, and saw a bunch of lifeless planets that as far as we know had nearly exactly the same conditions as pre-Life Earth, and people started rattling off increasingly implausible and special-pleading reasons why (“no planet yet found has the same selenium-tungsten ratio as Earth!”), then there’d be a problem.
I don’t see why you need to posit exotic scenarios when the mundane will do.
Neither do I, hence my current low credence in a Great Filter and my currently high credence for, “We’re just far from the mean; sometimes that does happen, especially in distributions with high variance, and we don’t know the variance right now.”
Well I agree with you on all of that. How is it non-causal?
Or have I misunderstood and you only object to the “aliens had FOOM AI go wrong” explanations but have no trouble with the “earth is just weird” explanation?
It isn’t. The people who affirmatively believe in the Great Filter being a real thing rather than part of their ignorance are, in my view, the ones who believe in a noncausal model.