Stuart_Armstrong comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong

48 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 03 September 2014 09:37PM

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Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 24 September 2014 09:58:13AM 2 points [-]

"Suppose I had a hypothesis that all Earth-era and earlier planets shared some feature that some later planets don't."

Then we can do the reverse approach - crush all the data we do know, and see what changed about the time our Earth came around. We can then take all these candidates, and check whether any seem plausible, then do some further investigation.

Comment author: Decius 26 September 2014 03:09:34AM 3 points [-]

While not logically impossible, a test that requires an astronomical amount of time to attempt is not something I can update on.

That said, there is a fairly low prior that the conditions for a galactic civilization to develop in the current era are better than they were last era. There is, however, quite a bit of evidence that there is not currently a galactic civilization.