The Drake equation, the Fermi paradox, and the sociology of science fiction

For some reason or the other there’s been a recent flurry of renewed interest from non-wacky corners in UFOs, ETs, and the general question of whether intelligent life exists somewhere else in the galaxy/universe/multiverse, and the related but really quite separate question of, if we assume the answer is “yes,” what the probability might be that humans would ever make contact with such life.

I wrote about the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox a couple of years ago, so you can go to that post for background if you’re not familiar with the concepts.

From a statistical standpoint, the following critique of such speculations seems right to me:

No amount of fancy probabilistic analysis can justify treating guesswork and wishful thinking as having any sort of scientific weight. Applying scientific techniques to an inherently unscientific endeavor, such as inventing estimates to unknowns about the Universe, doesn’t make it any more scientific. The opposite of knowledge isn’t ignorance; it’s the illusion of knowledge.

It’s still possible that life, and even intelligent life, is ubiquitous in our galaxy and the Universe. It’s also possible that one is common and one is uncommon, or that both are extraordinarily rare. Until we have more information, don’t be fooled by the headlines: these aren’t brilliant estimates or groundbreaking work. It’s guessing, in the absence of any good evidence. That’s no way to do science. In fact, until we have better evidence, it’s not science at all.

This is because, as the author points out, we have no idea — quite literally no idea — what the odds are that life has arisen on another planet, since we’re working with a sample of 1, and we are basically still just guessing in regard to what the causal mechanism was that caused it to arise on this one. Similarly, we have literally no idea what the probability might be that life on other worlds would eventually evolve into an intelligent, technologically advanced form. You can say the probability is .01 x .01 for every inhabitable exoplanet, which is a formula which gives you hundreds of thousands of intelligent species in the Milky Way alone, not to mention the other one or two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

Or you can say the probability is .00000000000001 x .0000000000000001, which means it’s incredibly unlikely there have ever been any other intelligent life forms in this galaxy, and fairly unlikely that they’ve existed anywhere in the observable universe. The point being that when you have no data, making up data is not a substitute for not having any in the first place.

I just want to add another point to this basic observation, which is these analyses tend to give short shrift to a further set of questions for which we have zero data, which is what are the odds that any other intelligent species would have any interest in trying to make contact with other species, let alone interest in colonizing neighboring — loosely speaking — stars, quadrants of a galaxy, etc?

Here’s a question that actually does have an answer, which is when did human beings start getting interested in doing that? I don’t know what the answer is, but my vague impression is that anything that we would now consider “science fiction” or even proto-examples of that genre is a very very recent cultural development, as in the last 150-200 (?) years or so. I’m focusing on literary interest in the topic because it’s a pet little theory of mine that lots of scientific work is driven by pre-existing cultural interests, as reflected in things like literature.

In other words, novelists, essayists, etc, start writing about going to other worlds, and science and technology get interested in the same questions because of a complicated cultural feedback mechanism, i.e., poets are the unacknowledged rocket scientists of the world.

Anyway, it seems to me that the essentially sociological aspects of speculating about other worlds/species/civilizations is an under-discussed aspect of the whole Drake-Fermi set of conundrums.