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Comment by superposeur | Hacker News Reader

Yes, these are alternative explanations. The explanation that is surprisingly undermentioned is the one I put forward: there is no life.

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How do you explain it happening exactly once?

If it’s vanishingly unlikely, but space is incomprehensibly huge and time is vastly long, then it happening exactly once is extremely improbable. 0 times, believable. But those probabilities yielding 1 life event must mean 2 life events is also possible, no? Or 3? Or 100? Why so confident it’s exactly 1?

All that's required to explain the Fermi Paradox is that it happen < 1 in an observable volume of the universe. The volume of the universe in which OoL could happen could be vastly larger, but we could never see most of it. Each extremely rare occurrence of intelligent life would never be able to contact any other, as they'd never be causally connected by signals traveling at the speed of light.

This is my thought as well.

The biggest recurring mistake that humans have made throughout history is to think themselves special and unique. The heavens don't orbit the Earth.

How is this the biggest mistake? So far it does appear to be the case. What negative consequences have come of believing ourselves to be unique? We have yet to find, on our planet or elsewhere, any creatures that build complex systems out of dead things.

He's engaging in a kind of ad hominem argument, that believing we are unique is a morally questionable position, therefore we must believe otherwise.

The errors in history have been the opposite: believing other intelligences are more common than they have turned out to be. The world was filled with non-human creatures in mythology and folklore. In the 1700s it was presumed every planet in the solar system had intelligent life on it.

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