Re: Fermi Paradox in the news

From: Jason Joel Thompson (jasonjthompson@home.com)
Date: Fri Oct 27 2000 - 13:28:42 MDT


Hi Eugene.

You responded to my post with some comments regarding impact ejecta (which I
had specifically ruled -against- in pursuit of a purely hypothetical
scenario against observer biases) and I pretty much agree with everything
you said.

You're arguing the hard science and in my opinion this is precisely the way
we should approach this problem. Of -course- a second intelligence emerging
independently is valuable information.

> Of course, the more blips you have, the more information. The step
> from one blip (just you) to the second (preferably from afar) is very
> large, the other ones decrease logarithmically. If you have 100 blips
> already, one extra conveys almost no additional information.

Absolute agreement (if you're granting that the first step is logarithmic as
well.) What I'm arguing against is that the first blip provides NO
information. What I'm arguing for is that the observer selection effect
selects for _realities that create observers_ (the broadest possible scale,)
and doesn't distinguish between 'blips' in the same way that we find
important for science.

I have no further comments on your post: I agree with it, but it's not
arguing the observer selection issue.

--
   ::jason.joel.thompson::
   ::founder::
    www.wildghost.com


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