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Re:A Trillion Worlds by ceejayoz on Friday July 20, 2018 @10:08AM (#17575084)
"We substituted some guessed numbers for our own" isn't so much a "reasonable claim" as a thought experiment.

Even accepting their numbers, it's hardly "dissolved".

> When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively).

Re:A Trillion Worlds by Tossrock on Friday July 20, 2018 @02:02PM (#17577338)
The key insight isn't the substituion of new numbers, it's the use of probability distributions with error bars throughout the calculation, as opposed to picking a single number. The canonical paradox is that even if you pick very small numbers for all the unknown terms, the resulting expected number of communicating civilizations is still high. This work shows that it isn't a paradox when viewed through the lense of a probability distribution, because even if the expected number is high, that's because of a long tail of super high, low probability numbers, while most of the probability is actually on 'alone in galaxy'.