
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox - _pius
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
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pjdorrell
For l_c, which contains the probability of the origin of life from non-living
precursors, the authors suggest an LU (orders of magnitude) of ~200, and say
"though one could easily argue for much larger LU".

Indeed one could argue. For example, the simplest known self-contained
organism has ~500,000bp of genome which is roughly equivalent to LU (which is
log base 10) of 300,000.

Obviously simpler organisms _could_ exist, and could have existed in the
distant past. But how much simpler they could actually be is pure speculation.

300,000 is much bigger than 200. It is so enormous that it completely
dominates all the other LU values.

It is so enormous that it is difficult to make any informed estimate about the
probability distribution of log f_c.

But it tells us not to be surprised that we are completely alone in the
observable universe.

