Are we alone in the face of uncertainty?

I keep seeing articles on the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox on my news feed, and since I tend to click through and read them, I keep getting more of them.  And since I find at least some of the ideas interesting, I keep blogging about them.  So there will probably be a few more posts on this topic.  Here's one.

One of the key features of the Drake equation is how little we know, even now, about most of the factors.  Along these lines, a recent (preprint) paper by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord claims to "dissolve" the Fermi Paradox (with so many other stars out there why haven't we heard from them?), claiming to find "a substantial ex ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe".

As far as I can make out, "ex ante" (from before) means something like "before we gather any further evidence by trying to look for life".  In other words, there's no particular reason to believe there should be other intelligent life in the universe, so we shouldn't be surprised that we haven't found any.

I'm not completely confident that I understand the analysis correctly, but to the extent I do, I believe it goes like this (you can probably skip the bullet points if math makes your head hurt -- honestly, some of this makes my head hurt):

• We have very little knowledge of the some of the factors in the Drake equation, particularly fl (probability of life on a planet that might support life) fi (probability of a planet with life developing intelligent life) and L (the length of time a civilization produces a detectable signal)
• Estimates of those range over orders of magnitude.
• Estimates for L range from 50 years to a billion or even 10 billion years.
• The authors do some modeling and come up with a range of uncertainty of 50 orders of magnitude for fl.  That is, it might be close to 1 (that is, close to 100% certain), or it might be more like 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  Likewise they take fi to range over three orders of magnitude, from near 1 to 1 in 1,000.
• Rather than assigning a single number to every term, as most authors do, it makes more sense to assign a probability distribution.  That is, instead of saying "the probability of life arising on a suitable planet is 90%", or 0.01% or whatever, assign probability for each possible value (the actual math is a bit more subtle, but that should do for our purposes).  Maybe the most likely probability of life developing intelligence is 1 in 20, but there's a possibility, though not as likely, that it's actually 1 in 10 or 1 in 100, so take that into account with a probability distribution..
• (bear in mind that the numbers were looking at are themselves probabilities, so we're assigning a probability that the probability is a given number -- this is the part that makes my head hurt a bit)
• Since we're looking very wide ranges of values, a reasonable distribution is the "log normal" distribution -- basically "the number of digits fits a bell curve".
• These distributions have very long tails, meaning that if, say, 1 in a thousand is a likely value for the chance of life evolving into intelligent life, then (depending on the exact parameters) 1 in a million may be reasonably likely, 1 in a billion not too unlikely and 1 in trillion is not out of the question.
• The factors in the Drake equation multiply, following the rules of probability, so it's quite possible that the aggregate result is very small.
• For example if it's reasonably likely that fl is 1 in a trillion and fi is 1 in a million, then we can't ignore the chance that the product of the two is 1 in a quintillion.
• Numbers like that would make it unlikely that there is any life in our galaxy's few hundred billion stars and that ours just happened to get lucky.
• Putting it all together, they estimate that there's a significant chance that we're alone in the observable universe.

I'm not sure how much of this I buy.

There are two levels of probability here.  The terms in the Drake equation represent what has actually happened in the universe.  An omniscient observer that knew the entire history of every planet in the universe (and exactly what was meant by "life" and "intelligent") could count the number of planets, the number that had developed life and so forth and calculate the exact values of each factor in the equation.

The probability distributions in the paper, as I understand it, represent our ignorance of these numbers.  For all we know, the portion of "habitable" planets with intelligent life is near 100%, or near 1 in a quintillion or even lower.  If that's the case, then the paper is exploring to what extent our current knowledge is compatible with there being no other life in the universe.  The conclusion is that the two are fairly compatible -- if you start with what (very little) we know about the likelihood of life and so forth, there's a decent chance that the low estimates are right, or even too optimistic, and there's no one but us.

Why?  Because low probabilities are more plausible than we think, and multiplying probabilities increases that effect.  Again, the math is a bit subtle, but if you have a long chain of contingencies, any one of them failing breaks the whole chain.  If you have several unlikely links in the chain, the chances of the chain breaking are even better.

The conclusion -- that for all we know life might be extremely rare -- seems fine.  It's the methodology that makes me a bit queasy.

I've always found the Drake equation a bit long-winded.  Yes, the probability of intelligent life evolving on a planet is the probability of life evolving at all multiplied by the probability of life evolving into intelligent life, but does that really help?

On the one hand, it seems reasonable to separate the two.  As far as we know it took billions of years to go from one to the other, so clearly they're two different things.

But we don't really know the extent of our uncertainty about these things.  If you ask for an estimate of any quantity like this, or do your own estimate based on various factors, you'll likely* end up with something in the wide range of values people consider plausible enough to publish (I'm hoping to say more on this theme in a future post).  No one is going to say "zero ... absolutely no chance" in a published paper, so it's a matter of deriving a plausible really small number consistent given our near-complete ignorance of the real number -- no matter what that particular number represents or how many other numbers it's going to be combined with.

You could almost certainly fit the results of surveying several good-faith attempts into a log-normal distribution.  Log-normal distributions are everywhere, particularly where the normal normal distribution doesn't fit because the quantity being measured has something exponential about it -- say, you're multiplying probabilities or talking about orders of magnitude.

If the question is "what is the probability of intelligent life evolving on a habitable planet?" without any hints as to how to calculate it, that is, one not-very-well-determined number rather than two, then the published estimates, using various methodologies, should range from a small fraction to fairly close to certainty depending on the assumptions used by the particular authors.  You could then plug these into a log normal distribution and get some representation of our uncertainty about the overall question, regardless of how it's broken down.

You could just as well ask "What is the probability of any self-replicating system arising on a habitable planet?", "What is the probability of a self-replicating system evolving into cellular life?"  "What is the probability of cellular life evolving into multicellular life?" and so forth, that is, breaking the problem down into several not-very-well-determined numbers.  My strong suspicion is that the distribution for any one of those sub-parts will look a lot like the distribution for the one-question version, or the parts of the two-question version, because they're basically the same kind of guess as any answer to the overall question.  The difference is just in how many guesses your methodology requires you to make.

In particular, I seriously doubt that anyone is going to cross-check that pulling together several estimates is going to yield the same distribution, even approximately, as what's implied by a single overall estimate.  Rather, the more pieces you break the problem into, the more likely really small numbers become, as seen in the paper.

I think this is consistent with the view that the paper is quantifying our uncertainty.  If the methodology for estimating the number of civilizations requires you to break your estimate into pieces, each itself with high uncertainty, you'll get an overall estimate with very high uncertainty.  The conclusion "we're likely to be alone" will lie within that extremely broad range, and may even take up a sizable chunk of it.  But again, I think this says much more about our uncertainty than about the actual answer.

I suspect that if you surveyed estimates of how likely intelligent life is using any and all methodologies*, the distribution would imply that we're not likely to be alone, even if intelligent life is very rare.  If you could find estimates of fine-grained questions like "what is the probability of multicellular life given cellular life?" you might well get a distribution that implied we're an incredibly unlikely fluke and really shouldn't be here at all.  In other words, I don't think the approach taken in the paper is likely to be robust in the face of differing methodologies.  If it's not, it's hard to draw any conclusions from it about the actual likelihood of life.

I'm not even sure, though, how feasible it would be to survey a broad sample of methodologies.  The Drake formulation dominates discussion, and that itself says something.  What estimates are available to survey depends on what methods people tend to use, and that in turn depends on what's likely to get published.  It's not like anyone somehow compiled a set of possible ways to estimate the likelihood of intelligent life and prospective authors each picked one at random.

The more I ponder this, the more I'm convinced that the paper is a statement about the Drake equation and our uncertainty in calculating the left hand side from the right.  It doesn't "dissolve" the Fermi paradox so much as demonstrate that we don't really know if there's a paradox or not.  The gist of the paradox is "If intelligent life is so likely, why haven't we heard from anyone?", but we really have no clear idea how likely intelligent life is.

* So I'm talking about probabilities of probabilities about probabilities?