The Fermi Paradox is a recurring topic here, and for good reason. It addresses one of the most interesting questions in science fiction: are we alone in the galaxy? What other minds are out there? And today it asks another important question: was the Great Filter beer? Hanay, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons […]
Was The Great Filter Beer? Read More »
After a long and winding discussion of the Fermi Paradox, we concluded there are 0.5 high tech civilizations in the galaxy today. (For the sake of human ego, we’ll round that up to 1). In other words, we’re alone in the galaxy. Oh, there are plenty of life-bearing planets out there. There might be millions
The Fermi Paradox – alone in the galaxy Read More »
In a blog post from a few years back, speculating about the Fermi Paradox, I discussed why the percentage of intelligent life-forms that develop high-tech civilization you can see across interstellar distances might be very low. (There’s a whole series of posts on this topic, starting here). That old blog post series came back to
Zombie trees liberated humanity from the Great Filter Read More »
This post builds on my previous series about the Fermi Paradox. Quoting Nick Land, expat Brit philosopher in Shanghai, “The cosmic reality visible to us is characterized by an intense, efficient aversion to the existence of advanced civilizations.” He calls whatever it is that prevents the existence of advanced civilizations “The Great Filter.” Longtime science fiction
An Exterminator-Free Galaxy Read More »
Long article about Elon Musk at Aeon. Musk, along with Peter Thiel, is one of the few modern capitalists who resembles the Heinlein hero D.D.Harriman (or one of Ayn Rand’s late-career male lead characters): an innovator who wants to remake the world of possibilities, expand the pie for everyone, and grab a big slice of
Elon Musk, the Fermi Paradox, & religious motivations for space settlement Read More »
After numerous posts, in our speculations about the Fermi paradox, we’ve now reached an analysis of the final term in the Drake equation, L, the average lifespan of high-tech civilizations. If you thought putting a value on f_c, the likelihood of an intelligent civilization developing a high enough technology to make its existence known across
The Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation – The Longevity of High-Tech Civilizations (L) Read More »
So far in the series of speculations about the Fermi Paradox—why a galaxy that should be teeming with signs of intelligent life is silent—we’ve gotten a range for N, the number of detectable civilizations in the galaxy, to [5e-7 to 8e-6] * f_c * L. Today’s post will estimate the value of f_c, the fraction
The Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation – From Intelligence to High-Tech Civ (f_c) Read More »
In our last post, where speculations about the Fermi Paradox moved from astrophysics to the life sciences, we looked at some of the many ways life could be prevented from giving rise to a pre-intelligent species–say, an animal like Proconsul, the earliest known ape, living about 25 million years ago. In doing so, we knocked
The Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation – From the Cusp, to Intelligence (f_i, part 2) Read More »
So far in our speculations about the Fermi Paradox, uncertainty in calculating the Drake Equation has led us to a broad range, with N = [0.84-16.03] * f_i * f_c * L. Despite the uncertainty, we concluded that relatively high values of f_i (the fraction of life-bearing worlds that give rise to intelligence), f_c (the
This has been the toughest post in the Fermi Paradox series to write, because the question of how life arose is the most open. A look at the linked article will show a lot of different conjectures. Which one(s) explain how life actually arose on Earth and/or would arise on other planets are still unknown.
The Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation – Fraction of Planets Where Life Arises Read More »
