Information Processing: Evolution, Design and the Fermi Paradox - Stephen HsuBasic Bayesian reasoning, and a new perspective for me. Good one Dr. Hsu!
... What is the time scale for evolution of complex organisms such as ourselves? On Earth complex life evolved in about 5 billion years (5 Gyr), but one can make an argument that we were probably lucky and that the typical time scale T under similar circumstances is much longer.
There is an interesting coincidence at work: 5 Gyr is remarkably close to the 10 Gyr lifetime of main sequence stars (and to the 14 Gyr age of the universe). This is unexpected, as evolution proceeds by molecular processes and natural selection among complex organisms, whereas stellar lifetimes are determined by nuclear physics.
If T were much smaller than 5 Gyr then it would be improbable for evolution to have been so slow on Earth...
Update 10/29/09: Some nice comments, but, above all, Charlie Stross drops the hammer. It's an intellectual tour de force from someone who gets paid to think about these sorts of questions. Charlie flips the question around, and shows that waiting-time-for-stuff-like-us is actually very short. He doesn't fess up to his answer to the Fermi Paradox though.
Update 10/29/09b: Through some back and forth in Charlie's comments section, I end up searching on his treatment of the FP in Accelerando -- and one of the top hits is my 2006 Amazon review of his book. He's very much in the church of "post-singular societies don't go a wandering" (me too), but he explains why. According to Charlie Stross, life without bandwidth is intolerable ...
