Cosmologic philosophy: new estimates say we are alone II (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 27, 2018, 19:46 (2341 days ago) @ David Turell

But this article suggests we shouldn't stop looking:

https://bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/are-we-the-only-intelligent-life-in-the-universe-u...

"After Sandberg and his colleagues combined these uncertainties, the results showed a distribution pattern of the likelihood that humanity is alone in space.

“'We found that even using the guesstimates in the literature (we took them and randomly combined the parameter estimates) one can have a situation where the mean number of civilizations in the galaxy might be fairly high—say, a hundred—and yet the probability that we are alone in the galaxy is 30%! The reason is that there is a very skew distribution of likelihood.

“'If we instead try to review the scientific knowledge, things get even more extreme. This is because the probability of getting life and intelligence on a planet has an *extreme* uncertainty given what we know—we cannot rule out that it happens nearly everywhere there is the right conditions, but we cannot rule out that it is astronomically rare. This leads to an even stronger uncertainty about the number of civilizations, drawing us to conclude that there is a fairly high likelihood that we are alone. However, we *also* conclude that we shouldn’t be too surprised if we find intelligence!”

***

"So, what do Sandberg and his colleagues think about Fermi’s famous question: ‘Where are they?’

"They wrote that aliens are “probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable,” adding that their distribution shows a 39 percent to 85 percent chance that humans are alone in the universe.
But that’s not to say they think scientists should give up on the search for intelligent alien life.

“'What we are not showing is that SETI is pointless—quite the opposite!” Sandberg said. “There is a tremendous level of uncertainty to reduce. The paper shows that astrobiology and SETI can play a big role in reducing the uncertainty about some of the parameters. Even terrestrial biology may give us important information about the probability of life emerging and the conditions leading to intelligence. Finally, one important conclusion we find is that lack of observed intelligence does not strongly make us conclude that intelligence doesn't last long: the stars are not foretelling our doom!'”

Comment: Makes good sense. We might seem to be a miracle of life's development, but only continued searching and refinement of our understanding of life's origin will support the idea that we are alone.