Nope. I certainly have. It’s the same arguments I’ve been hearing from people dismissing AI alignment concerns for 10 years. There’s nothing new there, and it all maps onto exactly the wishful thinking I’m talking about.

Appealing to authority is useful. We all do it every day. And like I said, all it should do is make you question whether you’ve really thought about it enough.

Every single thing you’re saying has no bearing on how AI will turn out. None.
If a 0 is “we figured it out” and 1 is “we go extinct”, here is what all possible histories look like in terms of “how things that could have made us go extinct actually turned out”:

1
01
001
0001
00001
000001
0000001
00000001
etc.

You are looking at 00000000 and assuming there can’t be a 1 next, because of how many zeroes there have been. Every extinction event will be preceded by a bunch of not extinction events.

But again, it is strange that you can label an appeal to authority, but not realize how much worse an “appeal to the past” is.

This is not like the industrial revolution. You really should examine why you think “we figured other things out in the past” is such an appealing narrative to you that you’re willing to believe the reassurance it gives you over the clear evidence in front of you. But I’ll just quote Hofstadter (someone who has enough qualifications that their opinion should make you seriously question whether you have arrived at yours based on wishful thinking or actual evidence):

“And my whole intellectual edifice, my system of beliefs… It’s a very traumatic experience when some of your most core beliefs about the world start collapsing. And especially when you think that human beings are soon going to be eclipsed. It felt as if not only are my belief systems collapsing, but it feels as if the entire human race is going to be eclipsed and left in the dust soon. People ask me, “What do you mean by ‘soon’?” And I don’t know what I really mean. I don’t have any way of knowing. But some part of me says 5 years, some part of me says 20 years, some part of me says, “I don’t know, I have no idea.” But the progress, the accelerating progress, has been so unexpected, so completely caught me off guard, not only myself but many, many people, that there is a certain kind of terror of an oncoming tsunami that is going to catch all humanity off guard.”

this kind of journalism constantly teaches and reminds people that organic doesn’t mean life.

Except… it doesn’t. That’s just a dreamy hypothetical way that it might manifest, but that doesn’t match reality. It misinforms. The end.

Writers always know that “organic” will be misinterpreted by the public, and do it anyway, hiding behind “technically correct”. Personally, I think avoiding creating more misunderstandings about science and space exploration outweighs any “technically correct” bullshit. Stop intentionally hurting public understanding for clicks.

Yes, it seems pretty untenable that rare earth is the explanation for the lack of evidence of any life outside of Earth. But even if it is true that we’re the only life in the observable universe, the universe is still much bigger, and in many physicists opinion, probably infinite.

The fact that life seems to have evolved on Earth as soon as it was possible to is some evidence that abiogenesis is not the bottleneck. But the usefulness of this observation depends on the distribution of other things we don’t know. For example, if on planets where life evolves later, life never makes it to human-level intelligence before the planet becomes uninhabitable, then our early abiogenesis is survivorship bias, rather than something we should expect to be in the center of the distribution of when abiogenesis happens on a planet where it is possible.

What?.. no. That would be confirmed life on another planet. It would be the single biggest discovery in human history. You would have heard if that was the case. “Fossilized microbes” would be “life”. Nobody needs the life to still be alive to be a huge, huge deal.

If you’re thinking the word “organic” means “microbe”, it doesn’t. I guess this is the consequence of all the harm to the public understanding that all the shitty headlines caused trying to get clicks but still being “technically correct” despite knowing it will be misinterpreted as “life”.

Not 100% proof. That would require the universe to be infinite, which it still might not be if the curvature is within the tiny margin of error. It’s close enough to proof that it might as well be the case. The entire universe couldn’t be less than something like 130x the size of the observable universe, though… unless it has nontrivial topology. There’s always a caveat.

No they don’t. And you genuinely do not understand the gulf that evidence would have to overcome for aliens to be more likely than literally any other explanation for any phenomena you’re talking about. Including explanations that require extremely unlikely coincidences. Because coincidences happen. But if aliens have visited Earth, that requires an unbelievable amount of observations about the universe to be explained. And truly, the evidence to overcome that would be MORE than a good video. And we don’t even fucking have that. It’s pathetic how people act about UFOs and aliens.

The fact that it’s always bad evidence, or indirect evidence, should tell you that it’s always the same bullshit. If you believe it, it’s because you want to, not because there’s the tiniest reason to.

The Book of Why by Judea Perl

Aliens very obviously exist. Life evolved on Earth. The idea that it has never done that elsewhere is ridiculous. The question is how spread out they are in both time and space. The fact that we see no clear evidence of them points to “very spread out”. But it could just be complex life, or intelligent life that is rare, which is why we look for much fainter signals that we’d only see when specifically looking, like with JWST. Either way, they exist. Whether that existence has any relevance to yours is up for debate.

But they have definitely never visited Earth.