Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

The conclusion of this paper is, paraphrasing, "We should stop using point estimates for what should be distributions. When we do that, we get much lower bounds and have a better chance at being more precise, whether or not we are alone." It opens up avenues for more questions, which is the correct stance given how little we know.

"When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable." Opinions like these (I stop one step short of calling them findings, as this is speculation either way) resonate with me. I'm, too, more convinced by the Rare…

My summary: the Drake equation takes a bunch of scenarios and multiplies their expected values/average probabilities. But this is a bad way to combine distributions that are not normally distributed (and may look more like bathtub curves)! It turns out, if you combine these potential scenario probability distributions in a smart way, an improved "Drake" equation predicts a much stronger likelihood that we'd see no life anywhere. So there's no Fermi paradox, no Great Filter, no nothing. It's reasonable we're…

For l_c, which contains the probability of the origin of life from non-living precursors, the authors suggest an LU (orders of magnitude) of ~200, and say "though one could easily argue for much larger LU". Indeed one could argue. For example, the simplest known self-contained organism has ~500,000bp of genome which is roughly equivalent to LU (which is log base 10) of 300,000. Obviously simpler organisms _could_ exist, and could have existed in the distant past. But how much simpler…