“Indeed, from this perspective perhaps we should have a strong prior that von Neumann probes have visited Earth.”
I don’t think this should be strong prior.
The probability of von Neumann probes visiting earth seems heavily constrained by the age of the universe, the time taken for intelligent / superintelligent life to emerge elsewhere, the distance of this life from us, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the speed of replication of von Neumann probes (including the abundance of viable resources) and the speed of travel of von Neumann probes.
I think I agree with you actually. I think what I wanted to get across was that we shouldn’t have a strong prior against there being extraterrestrial craft on earth. To me the term strong prior feels pretty ambiguous so I just kind of threw it in there without thinking.
My intuition is that right now almost everyone has a strong prior against extraterrestrial craft being on earth in that they would assign a prior probability of like 0.01% or something. I think maybe our prior should be more like 5% that they’re on earth. This would dramatically change what probabilities look like for the extraterrestrial craft hypothesis after updating on new evidence (e.g. Pentagon report stating that they think UAPs are actual objects behaving in ways unexplainable by modern science).
Thanks for the interesting post!
One disagreement I have:
“Indeed, from this perspective perhaps we should have a strong prior that von Neumann probes have visited Earth.”
I don’t think this should be strong prior.
The probability of von Neumann probes visiting earth seems heavily constrained by the age of the universe, the time taken for intelligent / superintelligent life to emerge elsewhere, the distance of this life from us, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the speed of replication of von Neumann probes (including the abundance of viable resources) and the speed of travel of von Neumann probes.
Thanks!
I think I agree with you actually. I think what I wanted to get across was that we shouldn’t have a strong prior against there being extraterrestrial craft on earth. To me the term strong prior feels pretty ambiguous so I just kind of threw it in there without thinking.
My intuition is that right now almost everyone has a strong prior against extraterrestrial craft being on earth in that they would assign a prior probability of like 0.01% or something. I think maybe our prior should be more like 5% that they’re on earth. This would dramatically change what probabilities look like for the extraterrestrial craft hypothesis after updating on new evidence (e.g. Pentagon report stating that they think UAPs are actual objects behaving in ways unexplainable by modern science).