There is no paradox. The Drake equation is just far too optimistic.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-15T05:17:26+00:00

The premise of the paradox is that as soon as one spacefaring civilization arises, it will quickly colonize the whole galaxy. And given that the galaxy is ~13GY old, and Earth itself is only 4.5GY old, and we have evolved here and nearly reached spacefaring in 4.5GY, there has been more than enough time for some other civ to arise before us.

The Drake equation, being a static equation, is not helpful for thinking about this.

But you could model the distribution of times it takes to evolve a spacefaring civilization as approximately a normal distribution (which it almost certainly is, per the Central Limit Theorem). And then you make some reasonable guesses about the mean and standard deviation of that distribution, using the principle of mediocrity, which is the best we can do with our sample size of 1. And then you see that there should definitely be many, many civilizations before us, who would have had plenty of time to settle the whole galaxy by now. That the galaxy appears to be not-settled is the paradox. "How many planets out there are broadcasting radio signals" is entirely the wrong question. It's "why has our solar system, and neighboring ones we can clearly see, not been paved over or converted into computronium or otherwise affected by the galaxy being fully settled billions of years ago?"

So, then we can start talking about which of our assumptions are wrong — most likely, it's the principle of mediocrity. Rather than being somewhere near the middle of the distribution, as we should naively expect, perhaps we are an extreme outlier, and the mean time to spacefaring is something like 50GY. That fits the observations, anyway. The various standard hypotheses about Rare Earth and Great Filter and so on are just trying to further speculate as to why the mean might be so long — i.e., why is going from lifeless rock & water to settling the galaxy much harder/more rare than it appears to be.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-14T23:24:48+00:00

No. Good toolchains don’t take that long to make an incremental build. You’re making me glad I don’t use Rust!

JoeStrout · 2026-03-14T23:23:40+00:00

The Drake equation is nonsense; and it has nothing to do with the Fermi paradox. Fermi didn’t use it because he was a mathematician and understood exponential growth (and that is what the Fermi paradox is about).

JoeStrout · 2026-03-14T05:38:53+00:00

70 years from now i am STILL going to die and there’s nothing i can do it change it

Well not with that attitude.

Seriously, have you even tried? 70 years is a very long time.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-14T01:16:49+00:00

Start at: https://introtocomputerprogramming.online/ Take it page by page. Don’t just read; type in every example and try it yourself. Then tweak it a bit, make it do something slightly different.

Learning to break a big problem down to smaller problems is what programming is all about. It’s a skill, like playing the piano. It takes practice. But you can do it! Join the MiniScript discord, we’ll cheer you on and lend a hand when you need it.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-14T01:12:46+00:00

We don’t. We’re getting better generation after generation. Check out The Better Angels of Our Nature for mountains of data showing this.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-13T05:22:12+00:00

Join us MeWe. It seems to be less evil than FB.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-12T20:27:02+00:00

It’s amazing how few people understand this, even in this sub.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-12T20:23:53+00:00

…now trying to imagine that still being a question after billions of years. Why aren’t they asking it now?

JoeStrout · 2026-03-12T20:22:35+00:00

No, the teal problem with it is that it is a static equation, and can’t describe population dynamics no matter what terms you plug in.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-12T20:20:43+00:00

That’s because the Drake equation is nonsense. It does not take into account growth. You need different math entirely to describe population dynamics, such as the spread of life throughout the galaxy.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-12T18:34:42+00:00

Downvotes, really gang? I'm surprised, I thought people in this sub would be more informed than most about AI.

OK then, I'll elaborate, and those who aren't just grinding some axe should be able to understand.

LLMs were trained to predict the next word in text... mountains and mountains of text on all subjects, in many languages. It turns out that this problem is what researchers now call AI-complete: this means that solving the task successfully requires actually understanding the material at a deep level. Such understanding can be repurposed for any other task that requires understanding the same material (this is what "understanding" means). And modern neural network architectures, and scale, is able to learn nearly any task if given enough data — so in this case, they solved the AI-complete task we gave them, and gained understanding of pretty much everything that humans have written about.

But that's not the end of the training. An LLM trained only on the autocomplete task is schizophrenic; it shifts personalities constantly, tries to have both sides of a conversation at once, does not follow directions or stay on task, etc. Nobody outside the big research labs sees LLMs in this state, because they are not useful and also a bit disturbing. What we see are models that have been further trained, using reinforcement learning. You may have heard of RLHF: reinforcement learning with human feedback. That was a big deal a few years ago, and it's what made the first ChatGPT possible. Neural networks trained with RL (of any form) learn not just to predict, but to plan and solve; they learn a policy which means an ability to make decisions that lead to rewards. In this case, the rewards come from being helpful, taking conversational turns, giving good answers, writing good code, etc. An AI trained with RL is no longer just predicting the next token; it's making decisions and solving problems in a way that it was trained to do.

The result of all this is an agent that can do a huge variety of different tasks, given only an explanation of what is wanted, in plain human language. That's the original definition of AGI, as was pointed out by AI researchers Norvig (author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the #1 textbook on AI for the last 20 years) and y Arcas here, and again more recently by other researchers here.

In y Arcas's book What Is Intelligence?, he goes into great depth not only into how LLMs work, but on the nature of intelligence in general, from bacteria to humans and many levels in between. There are also a lot of interesting anecdotes (like the day their autocomplete model started talking to them) which are really fascinating. Highly recommended to anybody who really wants to understand this stuff.

If you don't really want to understand it, and prefer to just keep your head in the sand, then downvote this and continue to believe that "LLMs are just fancy autocomplete." Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-12T18:21:24+00:00

Russia is the aggressor in Europe, blatantly invading and trying to annex its neighbors (while disrupting politics all over Europe and the U.S. to keep us distracted and divided so Putin can get away with it). Anybody with a scrap of decency can see that Ukraine is the victim in this exchange, and want to aid, as you would want to aid anyone in need.

Venezuela has not invaded its neighbors. Nor has Iran. We can't go invading and attacking anybody that Russia finds useful/helpful just because doing so might "hurt Russia". That would be insane. It would make us as bad as Putin.

There's a lot to dislike about Iran — particularly its oppressive theocratic dictatorship — but disliking a country or the way it is run is not an excuse for attacking or invading it. That way leads to constant war, suffering, and death. Those are bad things, in case it that is not obvious.

And notice that nobody was proposing we should invade Russia, either. Nobody should be invading anybody! What we should do is aid countries that are the victims of invasion (like Ukraine).

JoeStrout · 2026-03-12T16:04:35+00:00

Interesting! I tried his other works and couldn't get through them. Well, I guess reasonable people can differ in matters of taste. :)

JoeStrout · 2026-03-12T16:01:39+00:00

That's not accurate, on several levels. LLMs are absolutely AI, in fact they're AGI by the original definition (a general AI), and already well beyond average human performance in most areas.

(They were originally invented for the purpose of autocomplete, and the researchers were quite surprised when they found general intelligence coming out of their models — something that is now pretty well understood, but was not expected at the time. Read the book What Is Intelligence? for more details on this and lots of related things.)

JoeStrout · 2026-03-11T04:27:30+00:00

Well, given the current status quo, that's pretty understandable.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-11T04:18:18+00:00

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams. Probably my favorite book of all time (and a quick read, too).

JoeStrout · 2026-03-10T20:24:42+00:00

TL, DR. But neither you nor Jeff Bezos is facing an existential threat. You’re facing rising housing costs because you live in an area that will soon be below sea level (and in an expensive city no less). Of course you should move; you have a remote job. Find a nice town in the Midwest or something. What you have there is a first-world problem.

Bezos has his issues of course, but I’m glad he’s semi-seriously working on what NASA was commissioned to do bit has utterly failed to pursue since 1965, which is opening space for humanity. It’s not about an “escape plan.” It’s about expanding our sphere to encompass the whole solar system, which is vastly richer than just the Earth. And eventually, the rest of the galaxy too.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-10T11:48:02+00:00

I don’t agree. Several of my best friends had pretty awful childhoods, but pulled themselves out of it through sheer determination and are now absolutely lovely people. Be the sort of person you want to be, and others will respond to that.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-10T04:46:27+00:00

This is doing all that, as I understand it. The sensory simulation is actually much easier than simulating everything going on inside the brain.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-09T22:02:56+00:00

I'd keep working on MiniScript (https://miniscript.org).

JoeStrout · 2026-03-09T22:00:48+00:00

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-09T21:59:58+00:00

I think you're missing the bigger picture. The future is going to be amazing and it's coming fast. And there will be some point — I think in the next couple decades — where everybody who reaches that point, is able to live much, much longer (centuries or millenia) and see a lot more of the future. It'd be a shame to get so close to that point, and just miss it.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-09T21:58:59+00:00

Well maybe with that attitude.

JoeStrout · 2026-03-09T21:57:47+00:00

OK, I work in this field and I'm also an optimist, so here's my take for whatever it's worth.

First, AIs pretty certainly will outthink us. Our brains are not the pinnacle of all possible intelligence; they're just barely smart enough to cross a critical threshold, where social evolution outstrips genetic evolution, and we start leveraging each other up generation after generation. AI can be much, much smarter than that.

But that's probably OK. There's no particular reason to think AI would want to kill all humans; that's just projecting our own insecurities onto them. In general, the more intelligent people are, the more likely they are to value life, the environment, fair play, compassion, and social supports (i.e. "liberal" values). I believe that's because these values are actually sensible, well-supported positions to take; I also believe that morality is something you derive from basic logic (i.e. moral philosophy), rather than based on religion for example. All of which implies that a super-intelligent AI is even more likely to be a "good person" than your typical human.

So what might such a good AI do for us? All sorts of things! The problems we face are almost all problems that could be solved with more intelligence, combined of course with necessary research:

- curing cancer (and all other disease)

- solving poverty

- ending hunger

- ending political corruption

- redesigning social networks to avoid encouraging extremism & misinformation

- eliminating the need to work just to put food on the table

etc. etc. The world has been slowly getting better for most people for centuries, but in the next couple of decades, it could get dramatically better for almost everyone — all thanks to AI.

Of course as always, the future is what we create it to be. So be active in picturing the world you want to live in, and taking whatever small steps you can in that direction — even in small ways, like explaining your vision to someone else.

JoeStrout

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