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That’s not an explanation. It’s a restatement of what the great filter is trying to explain.



Occam's Razor says that we don't see any aliens because none actually ever exist.

Anything else is, alas, wishful thinking.


I don't think Occam's Razor is that helpful in explaining why I can't find my glasses in a pitch black room. A better explanation is that it's dark. There may well be other good reasons, but Occam's Razor says to stick with it being dark.

Other stars are a long ways away, and intelligence-generated signals mostly dissipate into the cube of that distance. Also, the vast majority of stars are far enough away that intelligent life would have had to evolve a lot sooner in order for the light to have already reached us. Occam's Razor is going to look at those before working out the more complicated questions of how common life and intelligence actually are.


Or maybe intelligence only exists here on earth. Any explanation for its uniqueness would be as evidence-free and tortuous as evidence for it's non-uniqueness. (Given that we have zero evidence one way or the other.)


Occam's Razor would suggest we just don't have the technology to detect them, you'd need extra reasoning to explain why earth is unique among thousands of trillions of planets.


> ...you'd need extra reasoning to explain why earth is unique among thousands of trillions of planets

It is unique by definition, because we happen to live on it. There is no need to reason or explain anything, because it is a simple fact.


That meaning of unique doesn't have anything to do with the conversation at hand.


Again, that’s not an explanation. An explanation would explain why aliens don’t exist despite apparently ample opportunities for them to.


You are begging the question and reasoning circularly.

There is absolutely no evidence that there are "ample opportunities" for aliens to exist. Default assumption is that there aren't.




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