The Guardian view on alien life: what if it's not there?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: July 15, 2018 at 6:39:50 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Guardian view on alien life: what if it's not there?
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Guardian view on alien life: what if it’s not there?
> The universe is so big and full of stars that it seems obvious some must have evolved intelligent life. But it turns 
> out we know so little we can’t know what’s obvious. Quite likely we are alone.
> By Editorial Board
> Jul 13 2018
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/13/the-guardian-view-on-alien-life-what-if-its-not-there>
>
> Are we alone in the universe? Of all the billions of stars out there, is there none around which intelligent life has 
> arisen, no other conscious beings who have looked at their sky and asked themselves whether there was anyone else out 
> here? All we can know is that we don’t know of any others. But that has not stopped more or less well-informed 
> speculation. The universe is so unthinkably enormous and old that it seems almost impossible that only one of the 
> quintillion or so stars in the universe has actually developed intelligent life.
>
> So where are they? So asked the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. If other intelligent species are out there, why 
> haven’t we seen them yet? The mismatch between what we’d expect from the numbers, which is a universe full of 
> spacefaring civilisations, and what we observe – nothing – is known as the Fermi paradox. Few of the explanations 
> proposed for it are cheering. Perhaps all civilisations advanced enough to develop space travel are also 
> technologically capable of annihilating themselves as well, and perhaps they all do. Perhaps the first culture to 
> develop interstellar travel has already snuffed out all its rival species as they emerge, and is at this moment 
> watching our first tentative explorations of the solar system as a cat might watch a fledgling on the ground. Or 
> perhaps we have simply got the numbers wrong. 
>
> This last explanation comes from three Oxford philosophers, whose recently published paper examines the equations 
> that make the Fermi paradox look real. These have to do partly with the number of stars with Earth-like planets in 
> the universe, and, more crucially, with the probabilities of life evolving there, then becoming intelligent, and 
> finally exploring space. None of these are known and we don’t yet know enough to make well-informed guesses. So the 
> numbers that are plugged into all seven terms of the equations that estimate the likelihood of other life in the 
> universe can vary by 12 or more orders of magnitude.
>
> [snip]
>
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