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James_Miller comments on Open thread Jan. 5-11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Some people think that the universe is fine-tuned for life perhaps because there exists a huge number of universes with different laws of physics and only under a tiny set of these laws can sentient life exist. What if our universe is also fined-tuned for the Fermi paradox? Perhaps if you look at the set of laws of physics under which sentient life can exist, in a tiny subset of this set you will get a Fermi paradox because, say, some quirk in the laws of physics makes interstellar travel very hard or creates a trap that destroys all civilizations before they become spacefaring. If the natural course of events for sentient life in non-Fermi-tuned universes is for space faring civilizations to expand at nearly the speed of light as soon as they can, consuming all the resources in their path, then most civilizations at our stage of development might exist in Fermi-tuned universes.
Well we can for sure say that in our Universe interstellar travel is not hard. It's extremely easy, once you take humans out of the picture. With current technology we have the means to push spacecraft to 60 km/s. This isn't hypothetical tech, it's stuff that's sitting in the shed. At such velocities, craft could traverse the milky way galaxy 20 times over during the (current) lifetime of the galaxy (estimated at around 13 billion years). The galaxy is big, but it's not that big, not compared to the time scales involved here.
Unfortunately this only makes it much more likely that the second possibility is true: Evolution of AIs that spread outward and colonize the galaxy must be extremely unlikely.
In that case the vast majority of individuals (considered across all universes) would be members of those large spacefaring civilizations, no? In which case, why aren't we?
Possibly not if universes fined-tuned for life but not the Fermi paradox are dominated by paperclip maximizers or the post-singularity lifeforms in these universes turn themselves into something we wouldn't consider "individuals" while also preventing new civilizations from arising.
It only takes a few universes where that doesn't happen to mess with those numbers. Or to put it another way, fine-tuning for the existence of individuals seems like a smaller amount of fine-tuning than fine-tuning for the Fermi paradox.
In universes not fine-tuned for the Fermi paradox, the more fine-tuned for life the universe is, the sooner some civilization will arise that expands at the maximum possible speed devouring all the resources in its expansion path, which limits the number of civilizations like ours that can arise in any universe not fine-tuned for the Fermi paradox. Part of being fine-tuned for life might, therefore, be being fined-tuned for the Fermi paradox. (But you are raising excellent counterarguments to an issue I greatly care about so thanks!)
Yes, you can apply the Anthropic principle to the Fermi paradox, if you make some assumptions, but even then the case is nowhere near as clear-cut as applying it to the 'fine-tunenes' of the universe.