155
If you could ask one question and get a 100% true answer, what would it be and why?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
155 points (98.1% liked)
Ask Lemmy
27285 readers
1857 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
“There are four to seven alien civilizations equidistant to Earth, depending on the phase of orbit between the various star systems.”
Reminds me of that article a bit ago where some dude mathed out a probability that the Milky Way had about 4 different Imperium of Man tier hostile space faring civilizations
You got a link? Sounds like a fun read.
It's been done a lot of times, with wildly different results. The problem is that to get a final number like that, you have to make some absolutely wild guesses with almost no meaningful information to estimate, such as the probability of the first cell developing on a planet with absolutely ideal conditions for it to happen. We can't even really say that we even have a single data point on this, because we don't even know necessarily how ideal the conditions on earth were during that time, or how many times it happened but never replicated. That's not even touching on the more lofty questions like, are cells even necessary for life? Depending on what numbers you pull out of thin air for these questions, you could come up with a million civilizations in the Milky Way, or almost none in the entire universe. That's the really scary part: we don't even know what we don't know.