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Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Bayes ET
Glove-slap Dave:
In the equation, the probability of life arising on suitably habitable planets (ones with water, rocky surfaces and atmospheres) is almost always taken to be 100 percent. As the reasoning goes, the same fundamental laws apply to the entire universe, and because those laws engendered the genesis of life on Earth — and relatively early in its history at that — they must readily spawn life elsewhere, too.
...
Their result doesn’t mean we’re alone — only that there’s no reason to think otherwise. “[A] Bayesian enthusiast of extraterrestrial life should be significantly encouraged by the rapid appearance of life on the early Earth but cannot be highly confident on that basis,” the authors conclude. Our own existence implies very little about how many other times life has arisen.
Update with a glove-slap to SJ:
More ET:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/07/if-youre-looking-for-some-good-news.htmlThen, if you follow the link at the end of the entry to get to Katja Grace’s paper (Thesis):
http://carnegie-mellon.academia.edu/KatjaGrace/Papers/465317/Anthropic_Reasoning_in_the_Great_FilterA probability dense look at the risk of Human/earthly extinction.
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