gwern comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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SIA/anthropics strike again? "Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System":
(The Presumptuous Natural Philosopher notes: 'while it is true that we have no direct evidence of life on other planets, or indeed solid confirmation that the other bodies of the solar system are rocky and support life, all of this is at least consistent with our current knowledge, and consider the anthropic aspect: with a global population of ~1b in 1837, and a possible system-wide population of 22 trillion or 22,000 times the global population, would not the SIA provide crushing evidence that the other planets are likely inhabited?')
Well, that's kind of close. The average density of Saturn is in fact less than that of water, and the gravity at its cloudtops is only very slightly higher than at Earth's surface. Jupiter's isn't that bad, either, at ~2.5g.
Sure, but that's not impressive and you'd expect him to be close to right about those numbers. As I understand it, it's pretty easy to derive the volume of planets from optical observations of diameter, and the mass from their orbits & Newtonian mechanics, and then divide to get net density.