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《If you cannot verify it beyond doubt, then don't trust it.》
— Karūn the Wise [on oracles], 546 BC.
It’s irrational to draw conclusions before we can resolve remote planets with sufficient fidelity to draw any conclusion.. 🙈🙉🙊
Also: the actual universe may be much much larger than the observable one! ☝️
Oxford researchers argue aliens might not exist.
The argument starts with the Fermi Paradox.. Where is everybody?
Every time someone ran the Drake Equation, they plugged in a single best-guess number for each term. How often life starts on a suitable planet, say. Nobody knows that number. The honest range runs across dozens of orders of magnitude. But people picked one value, multiplied through, and got a confident-looking answer like “thousands of civilizations.”
Oxford team did the obvious thing. They replaced each guess with a probability distribution that actually reflects how little we know, and ran it again.
The paradox disappeared.
Once you account for the real uncertainty, there’s a large probability, roughly a coin flip or better depending on your priors, that we are alone in the observable universe. Not “they’re hiding.” Not “they’re too far.” Alone.
It’s one of those results that sounds like a letdown for about ten seconds and then flips into something much heavier.
Because if we’re alone, the AI question stops being about us.
Everyone frames AI safety as a species-level risk. One planet, one civilization, bad outcome. That’s already serious. But the usual unspoken comfort is that the universe is big and someone else out there will carry on.
The paper takes that comfort away. If we build something misaligned and it ends us, there’s no second attempt somewhere in Andromeda. The only known instance of minds that can look at the stars and wonder about them goes out, and nothing relights it.
That’s the whole argument.
I don’t know how to hold that lightly. I’m not sure we’re supposed to.
