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posted by mrpg on Sunday August 13 2017, @11:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-are-doomed dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A University of Arkansas mathematician argues that species, such as ours, go extinct soon after attaining high levels of technology.

"I taught astronomy for 37 years," said Whitmire. "I used to tell my students that by statistics, we have to be the dumbest guys in the galaxy. After all we have only been technological for about 100 years while other civilizations could be more technologically advanced than us by millions or billions of years."

Recently, however, he's changed his mind. By applying a statistical concept called the principle of mediocrity – the idea that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we should consider ourselves typical, rather than atypical – Whitmire has concluded that instead of lagging behind, our species may be average. That's not good news.

[...] The argument is based on two observations: We are the first technological species to evolve on Earth, and we are early in our technological development.

[...] By Whitmire's definition we became "technological" after the industrial revolution and the invention of radio, or roughly 100 years ago. According to the principle of mediocrity, a bell curve of the ages of all extant technological civilizations in the universe would put us in the middle 95 percent. In other words, technological civilizations that last millions of years, or longer, would be highly atypical. Since we are first, other typical technological civilizations should also be first. The principle of mediocrity allows no second acts. The implication is that once species become technological, they flame out and take the biosphere with them.

Source: The Implications of Cosmic Silence

For background, see: Fermi's Paradox and the Drake equation.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday August 14 2017, @09:43PM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday August 14 2017, @09:43PM (#553851) Homepage
    Strangely enough, Bayesian statistics permits you to do this. Abd it's not wrong. Knowing one data point is more than knowing zero data points. From a Bayesian perspective, we should conclude that we're more likely to be a member of a bigger-than-average group, but that's about all. Not all definitions of what such "group"s are make that statement make any sense, and therefore attempting to extrapolate is mostly futile as you say.
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  • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday August 14 2017, @10:17PM

    by Hartree (195) on Monday August 14 2017, @10:17PM (#553863)

    Indeed. What I posted was the tl;dr version.
    In truth, there's a good bit more information out there than I said. And it's gotten massively better in the last few years.
    If you take the Drake Equation, we've certainly put some limits both above and below on the term dealing with number of planets since we launched Kepler and some of the other recent observatories.
    Also, we have one positive data point of intelligent life arising, but we also have several negative data points (at least obviously so to the level of our remote sensing) for the other planets in our own solar system. So, the odds of intelligent life on a random planet are certainly greater than zero, but also certainly less than one.
    We only seem to see one surviving lineage of life here on Earth (maybe there is a dark biosphere, but we've not detected it) based on the universality of the genetic code and the similarities of all life observed thus far. (I'd love to have that upended, as would lots of biologists. ;) )
    Maybe there were more but they died out. Or maybe it only happened once. It's very unclear.

    Where this really gets into trouble is when you start trying to distribute out the observed information into probabilities for the various terms of the Drake Equation, saying this term or that is the one that is the limiting factor that you get in trouble very quickly. It's Voodoo at best and more likely pure fantasy at this point.

    (Sorry for the subject line, but what can I say. I'm a Zippy fan.)