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Desrtopa comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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The point being that if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and it hasn't spread (in order to maintain the Great Silence), then the odds of our 1 galaxy, out of the millions or billions known, being the host ought to be drastically smaller even if we try to appeal to reasons to think our galaxy special because of ourselves (eg. panspermia).
If the strong filter is propagation through space, then for rates which people could plausibly assign to the rate of occurrence of intelligent life, the probabilities could be near identical.
What are the odds that a randomly selected population of 10000 has any left handed people? What are the odds that an entire country does?
Ditto if the strong filter is technological civilization (which strikes me as unlikely, given the anthropological record, but it is one of the Drake terms). If there are ten thousand intelligent species in the galaxy but we're the only one advanced enough to be emitting on radio wavelengths, we'd never hear about any of the others.