Abstract
AbstractThe Great Filter interpretation of Fermi's great silence asserts thatNpqis not a very large number, whereNis the number of potentially life-supporting planets in the observable universe,pis the probability that a randomly chosen such planet develops intelligent life to the level of present-day human civilization, andqis the conditional probability that it then goes on to develop a technological supercivilization visible all over the observable universe. Evidence suggests thatNis huge, which implies thatpqis very small. Hanson (1998) and Bostrom (2008) have argued that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would point towardspnot being small and therefore a very smallq, which can be seen as bad news for humanity's prospects of colonizing the universe. Here we investigate whether a Bayesian analysis supports their argument, and the answer turns out to depend critically on the choice of prior distribution.
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