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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely, so unlikely that our existence is only enabled by anthropic principle

This is also my view. Drake's original rough guesstimates (100% of life-capable planets develop life, 100% of life-hosting planets evolve intelligence) are almost comical in failure to account for observation bias. Our existence tells us nothing about these probabilities except that they're not literally zero. It's like a government inspector going to different factories and noting that 100% have a government inspector in them, himself. Mechanically, the probability of amino acids coming together to form a protein should inform our highest plausible estimate for fl.

Realistically, the vast majority of abiogenic proteins would just die. Said protein must also have energy-seeking and self-replication capabilities from the jump. And that's not getting into evolving intelligence.

It's also possible that fl⋅fi⋅fc comes out to something like 10-24, in which case we're not literally alone, but our handful of fellow travellers did not manage to metastasize across the cosmos.

100% of life-hosting planets evolve intelligence) are almost comical in failure to account for observation bias. Our existence tells us nothing about these probabilities except that they're not literally zero.

It seems like we can make a very rough guess at the probabilities here based on the IQ gap between chimps and the dumbest human populations, the time distance between the human-chimp divergence and the evolution of intelligence, and how long life lasted on earth without this happening.

I don’t have the math for this, and I don’t claim it gives anything closer than an order of magnitude guess.

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