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Douglas_Knight comments on Astronomy, space exploration and the Great Filter - Less Wrong
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I don't understand how you jump from "so common" to "early on a planet's star's lifespan." What processes actually take a lot of time? A low-probability event, like perhaps biogenesis or some steps in evolution, would require many chances, but those chances wouldn't have to be in serial, but could be in parallel. The anthropic principle applied to such a scenario predicts that we would be near a star representative of such chances, not a star that by itself has many chances.
I may not have explained this very well. The essential idea is being examined is the proposal that one doesn't have a single low probability event but a series of low probability events that must happen in serial after life arises even as there are chances for each happen in parallel (say , multicellular life, development of neurons or equivalent, development of writing, etc.) In that case, most civilizations should show up around the long-lived stars as long as the others issues are only marginally unlikely.
Thus, the tentative conclusion is that life itself isn't that unlikely and we find ourselves around a star like the sun because they have much bigger habitable zones than red dwarfs (or for some similar reason) so the anthropics go through as your last bit expects.
I understood perfectly, I just think you're making a math error.
In that case, I'm confused as to what the error is. Can you expand?
No, you're right. Environments are favored by their lifespan raised to the power of the number of Poisson filters.