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zero_call comments on What are our domains of expertise? A marketplace of insights and issues - Less Wrong
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I agree (NB: also computer scientist, not physicist) with the premise that civilizations probably expand at near-c, but there's a problem with this. Since it seems that intelligent life like us could have arisen billions of years ago, if life is common and this is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox, we should be very surprised to observe ourselves existing so late.
No, because if there is something like a Gaussian distribution of the emergence times of intelligent civilizations, we could just be one of the civilizations on the tail.
Exactly. The argument is that, since being on the tail of a Gaussian distribution is a priori unlikely, our age + no observation of past civilizations is anthropic evidence that life isn't too common.
We have no idea what the Gaussian distribution looks like. We don't necessarily have to be on the tail, just somewhere say one sigma away. No observation of civilizations just corresponds to us being younger than average and the other civilizations being far away. Or we could be older and the other civilizations just haven't formed yet. But none of this can imply whether life is uncommon or common.