[ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox

[Kelly Anderson]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Alfio Puglisi <alfio.puglisi at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> After all the news about BICEP2's  (indirect) detection of gravitational
> waves produced by inflation, I was pointed by someone to this paper by Alan
> Guth, one of the fathers of inflationary theory:
>
> http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0702/0702178v1.pdf
>
> it goes something like this: if the eternal inflation hypotesis is true,
> the entire cosmos is undergoing continuous inflation, which gives birth to
> "ordinary" universes here and there. But since this is inflation, every
> second there is more room by a crazy factor like 10^37, and so each second
> 10^37 more universes are produced than the second before.
>
> Now, consider one of those universes. At a certain point, a first
> space-faring civilization may develop. As that universe gets a little
> older, it might develop a second one. But, older universes are vastly
> outnumbered by younger ones (by a factor of 10^37 for each second of
> difference), so a civilization picked up at random will almost always find
> itself in one of the youngest universes that permits its existance, and
> with no second civilization in sight.
>
> I am not sure that I got all of that correctly :-) It does make sense in a
> crazy way, with that biiiig assumption about the eternal inflation, which
> of course is unobservable as far as I know.
>

I don't think this explains why no one is "out there." It does explain why
there would be no one "out there" for the first civilization to pop up in
each universe, but there is no reason to believe that we are that one in
this universe. So I don't see how this explains anything for us other than
giving us yet another reason to doubt that a creator was required to dial
in specific numbers for our universe.

-Kelly
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