RustRanger

THE FERMI PARADOX HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED for sixty years you have been sold a mystery. the universe is huge, the stars are old, somebody should have called by now, and the silence demands an explanation. three researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford went to check the arithmetic under the product. what was in the old packaging: one number plugged into each slot of the Drake equation. a single value for the share of planets where life starts, a single value for the share where intelligence appears. point estimates. the trouble is that our knowledge of those quantities is smeared across orders of magnitude. you cannot be uncertain by a factor of a billion and then write down one number for it. so Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord fed in the whole spread of the uncertainty instead. they ran it twice, once from their own reading of the science, once from the range of published estimates in the astrobiology literature. the output: > probability we are alone in the Milky Way: from about half to near certainty > probability we are alone in the observable universe: from about 40 to 85 percent at those numbers the silence stops being strange. nothing is missing from the sky. no paradox left to explain, and no Great Filter needed to explain it. i went in expecting to find the trick, because a paper that deletes a famous problem usually has one. what i came out with is a complaint about method. one number written where a range belongs, repeated for sixty years. the fine print, and i am the one insisting on it. these are probabilities under the distributions the authors picked, so change the assumptions and the numbers move. the paper measures how little we know and it does not prove that nobody is out there. what it takes away is your right to be surprised that nobody has called. link in the comments