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chaosmage comments on Can we make Drake-like Fermi estimates of expected distance to the next planet with primitive, sentient or self-improving life? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (12)
A very rough guess is better than nothing, especially when the stakes are high.
And those expected distances are extremely relevant to the long-term fate of our biosphere. A universe where we're inside a 1000 light year bubble of no other spacefaring life is very different from one where we'll have to deal with contact in the next couple of centuries.
The probability that we'll have to deal with any contact of any species near our own tech level is very tiny, since the chance that they are near the same point in their evolutionary history is small. There's no reason to expect anything like Star Trek where many species are coming online at the same time. So any species are likely to be either much more advanced than us (in which case how they want to deal with us will matter more) or much less so, in which case the ethical obligations could become very complicated. Babyeaters are of course the obvious example here even though that seems evolutionarily unlikely. More evolutionarily likely possibilities could still easily create ethical or moral issues for us. But the specifics of the situation will matter enough that discussion now is not likely to get very far.
I fully agree. Again, the point of this is to create something like the Drake Equation. Something that helps spark discussions like this one, rather than make reliable predictions.
No, a rough guess that's wrong can give people unwarrented confidence that they think they know something when they know nothing.
At the very least you should at confidence intervals. That way you discover that you know nothing.
Correct. That is why all serious treatments of the Drake Equation give low and high estimates for every factor, and low and high results from those estimates. The same could be done with the equation I'm proposing.