There are so many other explanations for Fermi Silence - from the reality of extremely limited sampling to the creeping suspicion that we're too mediocre and underdeveloped to recognise truly intelligent life - that grand assumptions about our specialness seem more than a little premature.

None of this requires aliens who will teach us anything, one way or the other. It requires aliens who ignore us because we're about as interesting as a termite mound.

And once you've seen a few billion of those, you've more or less seen them all.

Not necessarily, because the principle collides with observer bias in this case. I don't think it's valid in this context.

"There are so many other explanations for Fermi Silence"

Of course. I'm not concerned about the explanations themselves though - more about the emotional dimension; the attachment to the underlying idea. Lots of people seem to yearn for the ETI to exist at all. They'd be fine with any of the explanations you mentioned to be true, as long as the core concept is protected.

"None of this requires aliens who will teach us anything, one way or the other."

My point is not that they would, or that it's a logical scenario. My point is that humans exhibit a strong cultural need for this type of narrative.

I'm interested in this anthropologically, so to speak. I don't really care about the actual aliens (or the lack thereof).

I realise this is kinda poking holes in Christian theology (always fun), and there are these kinds of questions for all religions. Can an alien reach Nirvana through meditation? Are there alien Buddhas? Are there Mecca-equivalents on all inhabited planets, or do aliens need to know the direction to our Mecca to pray?

The woo-woo "aliens are gonna come and teach us how to be better humans" is less interesting, I think. The underlying psychological need for some beneficent parental authority figure to come and solve our problems is almost too obvious.

Pet peeve, honed by endless discussions on Slashdot in the late 1990s: -ii is not a Latin plural marker. -i is a Latin plural marker which can correspond to a singular -us. Plurals can look like -ii, but only if the singular word ends in -ius. That's simply because you replace -us by -i, and if there was an i before the -us, then there will be an i before the -i. (Example: the gladiator's sword, gladius, becomes gladii. But one of those i-s is part of the stem already.)

Neither Jesus nor virus end in -ius, so their plurals can definitely, certainly, 100% never be Jesii and virii. They also happen to be words that end in -us but belong to declensions that don't use -i for the plural at all. (So no Jesi and viri either. "Viri" is a Latin word but means something else.) And on top of that IIRC virus is uncountable in Latin and Jesus is irregular even for the declension it sort of belongs to, and are proper names even countable?

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

So what would the plural of Jesus be?

My name is Marcus, and I whenever I meet another Marcus, I wedge the "Marcii" joke in there somewhere. I would like to be able to refine this. What would two Marcuses (which sounds so wrong) be called?

Note that Marcus is a second-declension (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_second_declens...) noun, which is the class where a singular -us turns into plural -i (again, only a single one).

But Jesus is fourth declension (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declens...), so if it has a plural, then in Latin it's something more like Jesūs (or, again, Jesus without the diacritic; I believe it only marks lengthening of the vowel, no change of the quality of the sound). But https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#Latin says that while it's fourth declension, it's also "highly irregular", and "singular only". It would seem plausible to me that the question never arose in Latin practice, because multiple people called Jesus could always be described as "multiple people called Jesus", and multiple instances of the Jesus would be an unspeakable heresy.

As for English, well. Though I was pedantic above, I should also note that I know that language is what people make it. If the vast majority of English speakers decide that the plural of Jesus is "Jesuseseses", then that's what it is, in English. Even if "just" a certain community decides on a certain usage, then that usage is what the plural is -- at least in that community's variant of English.

Having established that, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#English lists "Jesuses or Jesi" for the given name and "Jesuses or Jesusses or Jesi or Jesii" for the noun denoting the Christian savior. The variants with i-s hurt my eyes (pun not intended, but I'll take it), and as I explained above, have no roots in Latin (or the Ancient Greek that Latin got it from) but try to look Latin while showing deep misunderstandings of how Latin works, so I would advise against them -- they don't make you look smart or learned. "Marci" seems fine in this regard, but again "Marcii" is not. (Interestingly, a bunch of the Wiktionary quotations for "Jesi" are of the form "Jesuses (Jesi?)", i.e., cases where the author was questioning themselves on this point, which is kind of weak for a dictionary.)

I would say that since -s is the dominant way of forming plurals in English, "Jesuses" and "Marcuses" are the most natural choices, inasmuch as forming plurals of given names can ever sound natural. But I'm not the English police (nor even a native speaker). Only the don't-randomly-double-i-because-you-think-that's-Latin police :-)

> And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten.

The laws of physics results in occasional clouds of dust and water (life) that can contemplate their unlikely existence (humans).

The ~50% probabilities from the paper are not fundamentally more founded in reality than "Did another planet in our galaxy develop intelligent life yet that attempted to communicate? I don't know, so let's assume 50% either way. Therefore, we are alone with 50% probability." Should that number be 50%? Or 10%? Or 99%? You're choosing some prior there. So does this paper, and the priors chosen gravely affect the result. Of course, the paper has more intricate math and more solid reasons for their priors, but fundamentally it is still just assigning almost arbitrary probability distributions to parameters that we have no grasp on. Specifically (see my other comment), the numbers that they get primarily depend on the choice of prior distribution for the abiogenesis rate, which overshadows all other parameters. It has such massive error bars (>200 orders of magnitude by their own account) that arriving at a concrete probability (in the way that you understood it when reading the paper) is somewhere between misleading and a lie, because it's more or less just a projection of that prior into a single number.

In other words, I'm convinced they could have easily arrived at probabilities like 0.1% or 99.9% by reasonably varying their prior distribution for that parameter alone.

In other other words, this reading of the paper also confirms the general point it makes: The Drake equation is garbage-in garbage-out. There is no way to determine what numbers to plug into it. So let's just drop the whole unscientific nonsense.

I think you are misinterpreting the conclusion of the paper. The conclusion is that there is "a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy". This extra probability is because of the extra uncertainty within our estimates of the parameters in the Drake equation. But "substantial probability" is something entirely different than being sure.

The keyword is "observable" universe what about probability of life in unobservable universe. When we discovered microscope and telescope only then you could say that we started "observing" something. Modern science is only 100 years old and we can not even imagine what would be invented and discovered for 50 or 100 years.

http://cista.net/tomes/Carl%20Jung%20Princeton%20imprint/10%...