Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

Another great filter related question I posted a while ago but didn't get much response to:

Could the great filter just be a case of anthropic bias?

Assume any interplanetary species will colonise everything within reasonable distance in a time-scale significantly shorter than it takes a new intelligent species to emerge.
If a species had colonised our planet their presence would have prevented our evolution as an intelligent species.
Therefore we shouldn't expect to see any evidence of other species.

So the universe could be teeming with intelligent life, and theres no good reason there can't be any near us, but if there were we would not have existed. Hence we don't see any.

This is an interesting idea but I think it doesn't work. Say for example that another species starts 200 million light years away and is spreading a colonization wave at .5 which is a pretty extreme value. Then one should have at least 400 million years to notice that. And it is going to be pretty hard to do a fast colonization wave without some astronomically detectable signs. Reducing the colonization speed makes it less likely to be detected but increases the time span.

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Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012

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Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012

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