Can we make Drake-like Fermi estimates of expected distance to the next planet with primitive, sentient or self-improving life?
I expect everyone here has an opinion on the Drake Equation. (Comment if I’m wrong.) And that’s because it is an easy story to remember and spread. Never mind its glaring inadequacy or the symbols it uses: it gives you a number of alien civilizations and somehow that sticks. I’d like to see if a science meme with similar properties could be created to carry a transhumanist payload. So. Could you convince a random person of the following three points if you wanted to?
We’re getting increasingly confident estimates on the number and distribution of planets in our galaxy.
The other factors in the Drake equation have been discussed a lot—they remain guesses till we find something, but at least they aren’t going to change a lot until we do.
So we should be able to estimate, very roughly and while mumbling about priors, an expected distance to the next planetary body with primitive life, with sentient life or with self-improving life (i.e. something like AIs that can exponentially grow that biosphere’s cognitive capacity).
I think you could. And if you do, and if you can give a number of light-years, regardless of how much you emphasize the low confidence, aliens will suddenly seem more real to that random person. And so will, if not full transhumanism, at least some vague notion that intelligence must grow much like life does. I think that could reach a lot of people.
(If anybody complains that the expectation of some Singularity-like development is ideological: no, it is a reasonable guess based on the current evidence, much like Drake’s expectation of every technological civilization’s eventual self-destruction was reasonable in his Cold War era.)
The brain I’m typing this from knows too little math or astronomy to do this locally, so I’m throwing out the idea. Anyone care to play with this?
Why bother, garbage in—garbage out.
A very rough guess is better than nothing, especially when the stakes are high.
And those expected distances are extremely relevant to the long-term fate of our biosphere. A universe where we’re inside a 1000 light year bubble of no other spacefaring life is very different from one where we’ll have to deal with contact in the next couple of centuries.
The probability that we’ll have to deal with any contact of any species near our own tech level is very tiny, since the chance that they are near the same point in their evolutionary history is small. There’s no reason to expect anything like Star Trek where many species are coming online at the same time. So any species are likely to be either much more advanced than us (in which case how they want to deal with us will matter more) or much less so, in which case the ethical obligations could become very complicated. Babyeaters are of course the obvious example here even though that seems evolutionarily unlikely. More evolutionarily likely possibilities could still easily create ethical or moral issues for us. But the specifics of the situation will matter enough that discussion now is not likely to get very far.
I fully agree. Again, the point of this is to create something like the Drake Equation. Something that helps spark discussions like this one, rather than make reliable predictions.
No, a rough guess that’s wrong can give people unwarrented confidence that they think they know something when they know nothing.
At the very least you should at confidence intervals. That way you discover that you know nothing.
Correct. That is why all serious treatments of the Drake Equation give low and high estimates for every factor, and low and high results from those estimates. The same could be done with the equation I’m proposing.
Depends drastically on how easy genesis of ‘living’ systems is, and how likely you then are to get living systems that deal with their environment and each other in a complicated enough way to call ‘intelligent’ or ‘sentient’ (though I’m not even sure what that really means, social primates are just one of such a huge space of things...).
The first point is complicated by a LOT of things. One, with only one biogenesis to look at so far (or at least only one that has survived on Earth) we might miss types of life possible in very different environments or on very different substrates. Two, we have not reliably excluded life from the rest of THIS solar system. Promising places thus far not terribly well investigated: cloudtops of Venus, Martian soil (as opposed to rock) and deep geology, interiors of icy bodies, surface/subsurface of Titan, rings of Saturn. That being said, literally the oldest rocks ever found on Earth show signs of biochemistry. It probably happened FAST, suggesting it’s not that hard in the right conditions.
Another thing to note is that even if the genesis of a biosphere occurs somewhere, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the self-replicating things will become a major obvious part of that area. Earth is basically the best place in the solar system to be a living thing, for a remarkably simple reason: it combines high energy gradient with high availability of many different building blocks. It is the only place where you get huge amounts of light—a kilowatt per square meter! - hitting a rocky surface where liquid water falls from a sky of nitrogen and CO2. Those gases are all wonderful simple molecule feedstocks for building up into complicated molecules in the presence of an energy gradient. And on top of even that, you have the minerals and metals of the Earth rock itself burping up to that surface in volcanoes and eroding into the seas from continents, enriching it even further with all kinds of catalysts and cofactors and phosphates that you need for fast life.
Venus has even more light and gaseous small-molecule feedstocks, but the height at which organic molecules are stable is so far above the ground that minerals and metals hardly make it there if at all, making them the limiting factor by far. Titan has organics and small molecules in spades, and probably minerals dissolved in its volcanic water, but the energy input to the surface is either in the form of ridiculously dim light (~0.1% that of here, after the clouds) and an extremely thin rain of complicated, reduced organic compounds from the sky made only by the fraction of the weak sunlight that is UV interacting with methane in the air. Mars has minerals and sunlight in spades, but more radiation, potentially icky soil chemistry, and not as much in the way of atmospheric small-molecule feedstocks (those that exist are probably underground, away from the light). We have not excluded the possibilities of biospheres in these places, but if they exist they have to be just hanging on rather than being major constituents of the geochemistry like on Earth.
Alright, time for the bullshitting ass-pull portion. My max likelihood position goes something like this:
Low-biomass biospheres may be semi-ubiquitous but extremely difficult to find remotely without close examination. I would not be surprised at one existing elsewhere in our own solar system; I give that even odds.
Big biospheres like ours are dependent on the confluence of factors I mentioned above, plus possibly climactic stability. I’ve seen simulations to the effect that our solar system is more dynamically stable than 99.5% of all possible random arrangements of planets, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much—anything that sticks around a long time is obviously stable and unstable arrangements don’t last long, and there may be constraints on the way systems can form. That being said I would not be surprised at large biospheres like ours being rare, like 0.1% or less of all biospheres, especially considering the recent explanet evidence for unstable solar sytems and chaos after planetary formation.
At this point I start pulling things out of my ass and stop using hard numbers about the commonness or lack thereof of big complicated ‘multicellular’-analogue life, which we really still don’t quite understand the origin of as much as we like (and is actually one of my long-term research interests).
I then begin making weird noises about how the existence of other extremely intelligent things on earth (mostly chordates and molluscs) suggests that it ain’t that hard once you have complicated things that interact with their environments in a proactive way.
I then note that ubiquitous complicated tool use seems to only have happened once (the activity of certain birds I don’t think really counts, those are all quickie improvised things) and may be THE limiting step, seeing how it seems to have come from an interesting evolutionary feedback loop.
Between all these an my own suspicion that tool-using symbolic life lasts on average into the megayears at least once it is founded, when I give it a go I usually wind up calculating perhaps a hundred or two long-lived clades of symbolic tool-users in a large stable galaxy like ours, separated by thousands of light years on average. We won’t be speaking to them. Even if there were 10,000 in our glaxy, the closest would on average be nearly a thousand light years away.
The issue isn’t whether it is “ideological” but whether it is likely. And how likely matters a lot in this sort of context. The fact that in Drake’s main era, self-destruction seemed much more likely should maybe give one pause to wonder if similar levels of confidence in a Singularity should be justified.
It is also worth noting that to get the sort of average you want we need probably more precise data than just that in the Drake equation. Even that equation is only an approximation (among other issues it assumes that all the variables are independent). What you want to do would likely hinge even more on sensitivity to those sorts of issues. (For example, while Drake just needs the likelyhood of a star to have planets, you would need information about the distribution of such stars. Star systems near the galactic core in many ways look different than those near here.)
I agree.
For our purposes, we’d only have to look at the distribution around us, maybe something like all stars less than 1000 light years away that aren’t brown dwarfs. We know those pretty well.
This has already been downvoted into invisibility, but still I’ll say here that I’ve found this list, which gives 55 systems within 5 parsecs around us. With a bit of work, current estimates of the probability of habitable or inhabited planets could be compiled from this.
More importantly, I learned that the ESPRESSO project is going to collect far better data than we currently have, starting in 2017. If I don’t misunderstand the specs too badly, ESPRESSO should be able to tell us fairly definitely where in these (and more) systems there are planets with sizes and orbits that make them habitable. And from 2022, the E-ELT will help us learn more about their chemical compositions and probable weather patterns. From what I understand about theories of planetary habitability, these data should be enough to see where, if at all, to suspect neighbors.
I’m very happy this research is being done.
Will still take 2-3 orbital periods of the prospective worlds to be sure of them… but yeah, I’m thrilled at the astronomy research happening lately.
Upvote. The Drake Equation and SETI seem at least as relevant as, say, Pascal’s Mugging. GIGO, sure, but a standard dismissal in statistics is to say there’s not enough data, more research needed. Isn’t this where Bayes is supposed to win over frequentism, when it comes to imperfect or incomplete information?
Babyeater FAI would be very different, but could still give us big hints on how to make human FAI. It’s the standard science process, instead of reinventing the wheel, stand on the shoulders of giants and learn what other smart people who’ve come before have figured out.