Inferior Civilization?

sailorbarsoom@... [spacesettlers] wrote:

> Not only does anybody guessing that they are or are not there have a
> 50/50 chance of being right, but a much better chance of never finding out.

True story about chances.

A friend of mine is on a county volunteer Search & Rescue team in
Colorado. Once a year they have a meeting/training with the local
rescue helicopter pilot. This guy says -- quote -- "Every time this
helicopter takes off, there is a 50/50 chance it's going to crash."

My friend says he looked at his buddies, wondering if the guy was
kidding. But he wasn't. He argues that either it will crash or it
won't crash, so it's a 50/50 chance.

This is, of course, ridiculous. Now and then somebody tries to explain
probability to him, but he won't listen. It's funny and sad at the same
time.

Anyway... let's not be like this guy. :) We can estimate probabilities
based on measured statistics, or theory, or some combination of both.
It can be hard to know how good our estimate is... but I'm pretty sure
we can do better than 50/50.

> But since we can all speculate, I'd like to suggest a Great Filter of my
> own.
> Eucaryotic life is weird, in its very existence. A germ ate another germ,
> but instead of digesting it they lived happily ever after and gave rise
> to all multi-cellular life, and a decent chunk of unicellular life as
> well. How likely is that? How many planets have great conditions for
> life, and life arose, but that particular bit of
> predation-turned-marriage never happened?

Possible. It looks like eukaryotic cells first appeared about 1.5
billion years ago. That was after more than 2 billion years of
prokaryotes swimming around.

So, yeah, I could see that. Maybe when we finally get out there, we'll
find planet after planet of prokaryotes, but nowhere else that made that
leap.

Or, more likely, a few scattered planets here and there that made that
leap, but didn't make the next one.

If we wanted something Drake equation-ish, this is what we should be
focusing on: what is the average (and standard deviation) time to cross
each of these filters? Then we can add those up to get an estimate for
the distribution of time to colonize the galaxy, and from that, figure
out how likely it is that that hasn't happened yet.

Estimating those values is hard, of course, because we have only a
sample size of one... but it's no harder than estimating the silly terms
in the Drake equation, and far more useful.

> But like everybody else I don't really know. The Universe could be
> crawling with eucaryotes or something equivalent. As far as that goes,
> who knows how many "something equivalent" there could be?

True. But it's a hypothesis (which we could frame more concretely as
something like: going from prokaryotic life to eukaryotic life takes an
average of ten billion years, with a standard deviation of 5 billion or
so) that is falsifiable. We just have to get out there and start
gathering statistics on other pockets of life!

Best,
- Joe