Tonight's topic: Fermi Paradox, the Great Filter, and the Doomsday Argument

Greetings fellow deep thinkers,

Don't forget - we meet just outside the cafe area in the front of the store.

For tonight's discussion, I'd like to do something a little different and ask some questions about the fate of human civilization. Please review the articles below for an introduction to the topic at hand.

Question:
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. Why are there no know alien civilizations?
http://en.wikipedia.o...

Three answers:

Great Filter:

The Great Filter consists in some destructive tendency common to virtually all sufficiently advanced technological civilizations.
http://www.technology...

Doomsday Argument:
The Doomsday argument (DA) is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the future lifetime of the human race given only an estimate of the total number of humans born so far. Simply put, it says that supposing the humans alive today are in a random place in the whole human history timeline, chances are we are about halfway through it.
http://en.wikipedia.o...

Technological Transcendence:
The technological singularity is a hypothesized point in the future variously characterized by the technological creation of self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, or some combination of the two.

http://en.wikipedia.o...

Another mostly-unrelated factoid: "Scientists Predict When World Will End"

Also of interest: my article Our Techno-Utopian Future: Fallacies and Predictions

See you soon!

Greetings fellow deep thinkers.

One answer to the Fermi Paradox is that there is no paradox. The premise of the Paradox is merely a hypothesis: that the size and age of the universe suggests that there ought to be other planets and that, since our planet Earth, such as it is, would be typical among planets, there should be evidence of other life, at least radio emissions. The Fermi Paradox is a hypothetical paradox.

What if the Earth is atypical, an aberration, a singularity? Then what do we have to look forward to (a version of the Great Filter/Doomsday Argument)? Or: what if this was the crucible from which a hardy enough kind of life could find itself alive (consciousness) and later find its own way among the stars (a version of the Great Filter/Technological Transcendence argument)?

I would suggest that this is an example of Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, in which a philosophical query (Fermi's) tries to come up with a scientific (therefore, logical) explication for something that must take into account myriad details, and the resulting explanation is either complete and incoherent or incomplete but coherent. The Fermi Paradox ends up being more about the nature of (human) life than about the lack of evidence for other life in the universe. It is the old philosophical question, "are we alone in this world?" transformed into game theory.

Philosophically speaking, though we must plan for tomorrow (survival) we must live in the present, to wit: figure out how to navigate complex issues of population density, resource scarcity and cultural conflict (linguistic, family, religious and historical identities, loyalties and traditions). Back to Plato's Dialogues: 'first philosophy', as suggested by the life and death of Socrates, is found in politics, "the concerns of the polis (city)." If there is a Great Filter in our future, I think it would probably come from political failure.

Hi Eduardo,

I think you misunderstand what the paradox is. The Fermi equation is an approach to calculating the number of technological civilizations in the galaxy. The paradox is the fact that we have not detected any of them. That means that the Earth IS an aberration, but that is not a solution to the paradox - it just means that there is an isolating factor (the Great Filter) in our past or future that remains to be determined.

Hi David,

Allow me to try it another way. I mean to say that perhaps another way of looking at Enrico Fermi's proposition is that it is an overstatement of the facts and that it is only a leap of the imagination meant to motivate space exploration and astrophysical research beyond Fermi's time.

What are the facts? That we do not know if there is life out there; we have discovered no evidence. Extrapolating that there ought to be developing life out there just because we exist and because our planet should not be atypical is more a logical exercise than anything else. Therefore, we have the Fermi Paradox, which is a logic puzzle, not a factual puzzle, used to motivate the discovery of facts that can refute it, and that the Great Filter and all the rest are also part of the logic puzzle.

What's my point? That among other views, we can also say, without flinching, that we are utterly alone in the Universe, as far as we can tell, and that we are in fact playing a game of cosmological Solitaire to keep ourselves busy exercising our imagination.

Perhaps it is an uninteresting point, but being in a contemplative mood I found it interesting to not lose sight of it.

Cheers!
--Eduardo.