I deliberately tried not to come off as pessimistic. I'd just seen a pop science article on this paper that went along the lines of "OMG, 10^-24? That's so small! Aliens are basically guaranteed!" It was totally exploiting people's lack of intution about numbers. I just felt the need to point out that 10^-24 is much more run-of-the-mill than it seems. The crazy thing is that probabilistic things are multiplicative, so it's all exponential. The difference between 10^-3 and 10^-4 is a single extra flip of a 10-sided die. The odds of life on a habitable planet might be 10^-10, it might be 10^-100, but you can be damned sure our uncertainty spans many orders of magnitude above and below 10^-24.
(edit: I just looked up the pop article I was complaining about. It was in the new york times and the title was literally "Yes, There Have Been Aliens." Hence my crankiness.)
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I deliberately tried not to come off as pessimistic. I'd just seen a pop science article on this paper that went along the lines of "OMG, 10^-24? That's so small! Aliens are basically guaranteed!" It was totally exploiting people's lack of intution about numbers. I just felt the need to point out that 10^-24 is much more run-of-the-mill than it seems. The crazy thing is that probabilistic things are multiplicative, so it's all exponential. The difference between 10^-3 and 10^-4 is a single extra flip of a 10-sided die. The odds of life on a habitable planet might be 10^-10, it might be 10^-100, but you can be damned sure our uncertainty spans many orders of magnitude above and below 10^-24.
(edit: I just looked up the pop article I was complaining about. It was in the new york times and the title was literally "Yes, There Have Been Aliens." Hence my crankiness.)