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Hal Finney Wrote:
>However I think the anthropic prediction in
such cases is >that our history would have been just barely good enough
to >allow life like us to form. If meteor bombardment should >have
wiped us out, we would predict that we would have >experienced a history of
heavy meteor strikes, not quite >enough to wipe us out, but enough to be very
troublesome.
....... >. Robin Hanson has a
>couple of papers on this, http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html >and a more technical one at http://hanson.gmu.edu/hardstep.pdf. ..Thanks, they were interesting. I don't think
'not getting suddenly wiped out' can be described in the same terms as the
'difficult steps' he analyses, but we have been hit by a lot of
not-completely-deadly astronomical bodies. The effect of these could be very
crudely fitted in to his analysis if we suggest that each asteroid impact wastes
a certain amount of time, by wiping out promising species, etc. Then if we use
as a random variable the total time wasted, and if the expected time wasted is
much bigger than the time for one 'step' (about 1/2 a billion years), and the
probability distribution of the time lost is sufficiently flat for small times,
then we might expect to have 'wasted' one step-size recovering from
meteors..
However, I don't think all te
conditions I've described are actually met: For one thing, some meteors might be
helpful, for instance if they killed off powerful but incurably stupid
competition. If the probability distribution for lost time had a large negative
tail then we would expect to get as many helpful meteor strikes as possible
until the unlikelyness cost of having a larger negative time-loss would equal
the likelyness gain achieved by the 'extra time'.
On a more general point, I think one
thing that isn't stressed clearly enough in the articles you referenced is that
if we take as given that intelligient life evolved on preisely one planet
within our cosmic horizon, and look at the variation of some parameters
corresponding to how difficult the evolutionary steps must have been (and must
still be for the pond scum on other planets) we would expect them to be
difficult enough so that intelligence only appears once, but for things to then
be more difficult is less likely. So where he says the expected time for us to
evolve is approximately greater than 30 billion years or something (the precise
figure depending on the number of hospitable planets), I would say it's
approximately equal.
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