Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Existential and Global Catastrophic Risk
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Peel
Dec 3, 2007

DrSunshine posted:

I want to return to this point and piggyback off of it into something I've pondered about. Here's a possible Fermi paradox-adjacent question that I don't think I've seen stated anywhere else. It has a bit to do with some Anthropic reasoning.

So, many of those in the futurist community (Isaac Arthur et al) believe - as I do - that the universe in the long tail end might be more habitable or have more chances to harbor nascent intelligent civilizations than it is in the early end. This is out of sheer statistics: an older universe with more quiet red dwarf stars that can burn stably for trillions of years gives many many more chances for intelligent life to arise that can do things like observe the universe with astronomy and wonder why they exist.

So why is it that we observe a (fairly) young universe? As far as we can tell, the universe is only about 14 billion years old, out of a potential habitable range of tens of trillions of years. If the universe should be more amenable to life arising in the distant future, trillions of years from now, then the overwhelming probability is that we should exist in that old period, than it should in just the first 14 billion years of its existence.

This brings up some rather disturbing possible answers:

1) Something about the red dwarf era is inimical to the rise of intelligent life.

2) Intelligent life ceases to exist long before that era.

I don't think this logic works at all. We might consider it unlikely (in a sense) that any specific person will live in a young universe, in the same way that you're 'lucky' if you're born rich because most people aren't rich, but the total number of rich people and number of young universe observers are both, tautologically, the exact number you would expect to exist.

If X people live in the young universe, out of Y total people who live in the universe through its history, then the chance of any given person selected at random existing in the young universe is X/Y, which may be large or small depending on the relative values. However the expected number of people who do is that probability X/Y, multiplied by Y, the population we're sampling from. Which just yields X, regardless of whether Y is small or large, and how could it do otherwise? The probability X/Y becomes so small as to seem implausible only by the same choice of small X and large Y that makes the small probability irrelevant by increasing the sample size. The numbers are all defined in terms of each other.

* # ¿ Feb 1, 2021 03:42
  • Quote
Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 13, 2024 12:28
  • Quote
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply
The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Existential and Global Catastrophic Risk