[ExI] Drake Equation Musings

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2016-05-19 07:24, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
> ### Are you mentioning there the Shiva-explanation for the empty 
> skies? I mean the possibility that the physics of our part of the 
> multiverse is such that technogenesis leads early-on and with a 
> significant probability to the discovery of a simple method to trigger 
> a false vacuum decay, thus erasing the civilization and its universe, 
> along with any civilizations that managed not to become the destroyers 
> of worlds

Remember the Bostrom and Tegmark paper on doomsday probability? It 
shows, using anthropics, that the probability of vacuum decay is less 
than one in a billion per year. If we had been living in a Shiva 
unniverse we should expect to be very early (since observers exist 
before the vacuum decay), but Earth formed after most other planets in 
the universe formed and we look like we are fairly late compared to when 
intelligence could have emerged.

> The observable world seems to be consistent with such an explanation. 
> The probabilities surrounding the Shiva explanation are the opposite 
> of the black-box explanation - it takes only one in any number of 
> budding civilizations to trigger a superluminal erasure of a universe, 
> before any of the million civs ever get to see light from their neighbors.

Superluminal? I though all vacuum decay models had it spreading merely 
at lightspeed?


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