For whom is that a problem?
Escience News attempts to set some limits to our uniqueness
Frank said that the third big question–how long civilizations might survive–is still completely unknown. “The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly ten thousand years doesn’t really tell us if other societies would last that long or perhaps much longer,” he explained.
But Frank and his coauthor, Woodruff Sullivan of the astronomy department and astrobiology program at the University of Washington, found they could eliminate that term altogether by simply expanding the question.
“Rather than asking how many civilizations may exist now, we ask ‘Are we the only technological species that has ever arisen?” said Sullivan. “This shifted focus eliminates the uncertainty of the civilization lifetime question and allows us to address what we call the ‘cosmic archaeological question’–how often in the history of the universe has life evolved to an advanced state?”
That still leaves huge uncertainties in calculating the probability for advanced life to evolve on habitable planets. More.
Various nonsense calculations ensue. Of course, not only might we be unique, but conceivably, things could have just happened that way. Lots of things are unique. One can only derive a pattern from a number of examples.
We have never encountered the slightest evidence of an alien civilization.
The hat tipster who forwarded this item writes to say, “Because the valid examples of OOL and evolution are zero the odds are 1 in infinity, which sounds astonishingly low to me.”
Clearly the hat tipster did not study Darwin calculus in school, which make all impossible outcomes actual. The same thinking give us a multiverse.
See also: A blueprint for evidence-free thinking in science
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How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there?
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