And ... the Great Silence persists: More on the Fermi Paradox: Where is Everyone?

Before diving into the Biggest Question - Are we alone in the universe? - I'm pleased to announce new volumes in my Out of Time series of novels for teen readers who love adventure laced with history, science and other cool stuff.

New books include Boondoggle by SF Legend Tom Easton & newcomer Torion Oey plus Raising the Roof by R. James Doyle! All new titles are released by Amazing Stories.

Meanwhile, Open Road republished the earlier five novels, including great tales by Nancy Kress, Sheila Finch, and Roger Allen. Plus The Archimedes Gambit and Storm's Eye!

The shared motif... teens from across time are pulled into the 24th Century and asked to use their unique skills to help a future that's in peril!  Past characters who get 'yanked' into tomorrow include a young Arthur Conan Doyle, Winston Churchill, Joan of Arc's page and maybe... you!

All of the Out of Time books can be accessed (and assessed) here. 

* With coming authors including SF legend Allen Steele and newcomer Robin Hansen.

And now to the Great Big Question.

== Because there's bugger-all (intelligence) down here on Earth! ==

In "A History of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," a cogent overview of 200+ years of SETI (in various forms), John Michael Godier starts by citing one of the great sages of our era and goes on to illuminate the abiding question: "Are we alone?" Godier is among the best of all science podcasters. 

I also highly recommend YouTube channels by Isaac Arthur and Anton Petrov as well as the PBS series EONS.

Joe Scott runs a popular Science and future YouTube Channel that is generally informative and entertaining. And much more popular than anything I do. This episode is divertingly about what the year 2100 might be like. 

== Anyone Out There? ==

Hmmm. Over the years, I’ve collected ‘fermis’ … or hypotheses to explain the absence of visible alien tech-civilizations. In fact, I was arguably the first to attempt an organized catalogue in my “Great Silence” paper in 1983, way-preceding popular use of ‘the Fermi Paradox.” 

See Isaac Arthur’s almost-thorough rundown of most of the current notions, including a few (e.g. water-land ratio) that I made up first. Still, new ones occasionally crop up. Even now!

Here’s one about an oxygen bottleneck: “"To create advanced technology, a species would likely require the capability to increase the temperature of the materials used in its production. Oxygen's role in enabling open-air combustion has been critical in the evolution of human technology, particularly in metallurgy. Exoplanets whose atmospheres contain less than 18% oxygen would likely not allow open-air combustion, suggesting a threshold that alien worlds must cross if life on them is to develop advanced technology." 

Hence my call to chemists out there!  Is it true that “an atmosphere with anything less than 18% oxygen would not allow open-air combustion”?  That assertion implies that only the most recent 500 million years of Earth history offered those conditions. And hence industrial civilization might be rare, even if life pervades the cosmos. 

My own response: It seems likely that vegetation on a lower-oxygen world would evolve in ways that are less fire resistant. After all, there is evidence of fires back in our own Carboniferous etc.

== This time the mania just isn't ebbing (sigh) ==

The latest US Government report on UFO/UAP phenomena finds – as expected – no plausible evidence that either elements of the government or anyone else on Earth has truly encountered aliens. 

Alas, it will convince none of the fervid believers, whose lifelong Hollywood indoctrination in Suspicion of Authority (SoA) is only reinforced by any denial! No matter how many intelligent and dedicated civil servants get pulled into these twice-per-decade manias. 

I don’t call this latest 'investigation' a waste of taxpayer money!  Millions wanted this and hence it was right to do it!  Even if none of those millions of True Believers will credit that anything but malign motives drive all those civil servants and fellow Americans.

Shame on you, Hollywood. For more on this, especially the SoA propaganda campaign that (when moderate) keeps us free and that (when toxically over-wrought) might kill our unique civilization. For more, see Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.

…or my own highly unusual take on UAP phenomena. I promise fresh thoughts.

And here John Michael Godier offers an interesting riff on a possible explanation for the infamous WOW signal detected by a SETI program in 1977. 

== on the Frontier ==

Mining helium-3 on the Moon has been talked about forever—now a company will try. "There are so many investments that we could be making, but there are also Moonshots."

Yeah, yeah, sure. “Helium Three” (in Gothic letters?) is (I am 90% sure) one of the biggest scams to support the unjustifiable and silly “Artemis” rush to send US astronauts to perform another ritual footprint stunt on that useless plain of poison dust.  

Prove me wrong? Great?  I don’t mind some investment in robotic surveys.  But a larger chunk of $$$ should go to asteroids, where we know -absolutely – the real treasures lie.

Meanwhile, far more practically needed… and reminiscent of the very first chapter of my novel Existence…  Astroscale is one of several groups demonstrating methods to remove debris from Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Though we gotta hope that a desperate world ‘leader’ doesn’t decide to spasm wreck LEO, as his final gift to the world.

== Dive to the Sun! ==

The Parker Solar Probe – (the team named me an informal ‘mascot’ on account of my first novel) has discovered lots about how solar magnetic fields churn and merge and flow outward to snap and heat the solar corona to incredible temperatures.

(I am also a co-author on a longer range effort to plan swooping sailcraft, that plunge just past our star and then get propelled to incredible speed. The endeavor’s name? Project Sundiver! Stay (loosely) tuned.)

== Physics and Universal Fate ==

I well recall when physicists Freeman Dyson and Frank Tipler were competing for the informal title of “Theologian of the 20th Century” with their predictions for the ultimate fate of intelligent life. In a universe that would either 

(1) expand forever and eventually dissipate with the decay of all baryons, or else 

(2) fall back inward to a Big Crunch, offering Tipler a chance to envision a God era in the final million years, in his marvelous tome The Physics of Immortality.

 I never met Tipler. Freeman was a friend. In any event, it sure looks as if Freeman won the title. 

Only... how sure are we of the Great Dissipation? Its details and influences and evidence and boundary conditions? Those aspects have been in flux. This essay cogently summarizes the competing models and most recent evidence. Definitely only for the genuinely physics minded!

A final note about this. Roger Penrose - also a friend of mine - came up with a brilliant hybrid that unites the Endless Dissipation model and Tipler's Big Crunch. His Conformal Cosmology is simply wonderful. (I even made teensy contributions.) 

And if it ain't true... well... it oughta be!

And finally... shifting perspective: this ‘official’ Chinese world map has gotta be shared. Quite a dig on the Americas! Gotta admit it is fresh perspective. Like that view of the Pacific Ocean as nearly all of a visible earth globe.   A reminder how truly big Africa is, tho the projection inflates to left and right. And putting India in the center actually diminishes its size.

===

PS... Okay... ONE TEENSY POLITICAL POINT?

When they justify their cult's all-out war against science and every single fact-centered profession - (including the US military officer corps) - one of the magical incantations yammered by Foxites concerns the Appeal- to-Authority Fallacy.

Oh sure, we should all look up and scan posted lists and definitions of the myriad logical fallacies that are misused in arguments even by very intelligent folks. (And overcoming them is one reason why law procedures can get tediously exacting.) Furthermore, Appeal to Authority is one of them. Indeed, citing Aristotle instead of doing experiments held back science for 2000 years!

Still, step back and notice how it is now used to discredit and deter anyone from citing facts determined by scientists and other experts, through vetted, peer-reviewed and heavily scrutinized validation. 

Sure. "Do your own research' if you like. Come with me on a boat to measure Ocean Acidification*, for example! With cash wager stakes on the line. But for most of us, most of the time, it is about comparing credibility of those out there who claim to deliver facts. And yes, bona fide scientists with good reputations are where any such process should start, and not cable TV yammer-heads. 

The way to avoid "Appeal to Authority" falacy is not to reflexively discredit 'authorities,' but to INTERROGATE authorities with sincerely curious questions... and to interrogate their rivals. Ideally back and forth in reciprocally competitive criticism. But with the proviso that maybe someone who has studied a topic all her life may, actually know something that you don't.

*Ocean acidification all by itself utterly proves CO2-driven climate change is a lethal threat to our kids.  And I invite those wager stakes!

From the Moon to Mars and METI

I am infamously critical of the "Artemis Mission," re-doing glory that America achieved more than fifty years ago. Worse, a cabal of corrupt senators insisted that billions get poured into a make-work program of obsolete rockets that have no future. Oh, humanity will be going to Luna in droves, as nations, billionaires and other entities scurry to have their flag-waving, footprint-planting, tourist rites-of-passage. Those Apollo wannabes should have their ''bar moonzvahs' without elder bro churlishly shaming them by scurrying to beat them there. (We already did, by five decades.) 

Do not try the 'vast lunar resources' argument here. Blah blah. Except for a little water ice cached in deep, sunless craters at the poles, there are no such 'resources' there accessible by near future technologies. Nor compared to the spectacular riches that await us in the Near Earth Asteroids (NEOs). And as for that polar ice (first predicted by my doctoral adviser), our best steps forward are robotic.

Still, we are committed, I suppose, at least to the SLS-propeled 'stunt' part of Artemis. (Always remember who committed us to this moondoggle.) Moreover, I do hope and expect that skilled folks at NASA and ESA will strive to make this more than just an Apollo reboot, planting useless-symbolic footprints on a plain of poison dust. Science please.

Toward that end, very smart folks are trying to turn a lemon into lemonade, by selecting potential landing sites many of which are within reach of those ice deposits... and other interesting items like hollow lava tubes, which might offer best possible locations for lunar habitats. (We have a project to look at one of the 'skylight' openings, at NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC).)

In fact, I was impressed by how Jim Bridenstine, one of Trump's only first-rate appointments, protected NASA's other portfolios from cannibalism by Artemis. With some budget increases, this sabotage attempt won't sabotage at all!

It's too late to sway this decision. It's made. So I will root for the team... 

== More Space, More Space! ==

More spectacular images from the James Webb Space Telescope: exciting new discoveries about galaxies, exoplanets and nebulae.

Meanwhile, we've received stunning new high-resolution photos of the Valles Marineris canyon region on Mars - from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA's Mars Express exploring the surface of the Red Planet.

== Rockets ==

A DIY rocket system being built by Danish amateurs and crowdfunded may carry suborbital passengers in some years. Interesting project, reminiscent of the amateur self-launch hobbyists in my novel Existence.  

Meanwhile the U.S. Space Force plans "responsive" launch in 2023. As part of the fiscal year 2022 defense budget, Congress added $50 million for the US Department of Defense to better use commercial launch services during a conflict; this would help the government replace damaged satellites or deploy new ones quickly.  Space Force said it plans to conduct a 2023 “responsive space” demonstration where private launch companies will be challenged to deploy satellites on short notice, Space News reports.

== METI yet again! ==

Apparently, a radio signal designed to bring Earth's climate crisis to the attention of alien life will be beamed to the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system in October. As many of you know, I am a member of a loose array of professionals with long experience in this field, who resigned from most SETI commissions in protest, when the Second SETI Protocol was eviscerated, opening the door wider for reckless and insipid stunts like this one, rashly gambling our children and posterity based on highly dubious assumptions.

Here's the latest stunt, planned by the folks using a taxpayer built facility at Goonhilly Station in the UK, aiming to perform diplomacy with foreign powers bypassing the professionals we hire for such things…. 

…and a fairly balanced-if-cursory overview, mentioning also that it seems China may be about to join in this absurd spectacle, despite being clearly warned about potential drawbacks by the mighty Liu Cixin (in his great trilogy “The Three Body Problem.") I was not aware that China had added transmission equipment to their giant new radio telescope. But I cannot say that I’m surprised.

NBC online just ran a tendentious article by SETI Institute chief scientist Seth Shostak. I have known Seth for decades. Alas, he has lately tipped into polemic that is deeply flawed. This 'article' is rife with the usual hoary canards, long ago refuted. You are welcome to read his piece, then dive into the actual meat of this controversy here:

“Shouting At the Cosmos” – about METI “messaging” to aliens. 

But the crux is that Seth Shostak says nothing whatsoever about "why scientists are divided on this issue," preferring instead to deal out absurd, insulting and refuted clichés, avoiding all adversarial accountability by science and fact.

1. Like his claim that the dozens of scientists who express skepticism toward METI (or ‘active SETI’), many of them with decades of experience in SETI, are primarily spurred by fear of alien invasion. An absurd canard. Most of us are motivated far more by the rude and unscientific behavior of a very small coterie, dismissing even cursory discussion of basic concerns, like those routinely examined by NASA's Office of Planetary Protection.

2. He also says: “Homo sapiens might (might!) be around for a long time, and insisting that we never, ever point a powerful radio transmitter skyward could prove to be a weighty albatross burdening our descendants.”

Seth keeps accusing us of trying to 'stifle' humanity forever, when in fact, we have asked for open debate, exposing a wide variety of considerations and facts - not clichés - for examination by our scientific peers and by a fascinated public. The 'never, ever' thing is a grotesque lie. 

3. “They already know about us, so why not beam messages?” This is the worst cliché of them all. We deal with its absurd illogic in the linked missive. Not only do our TV shows fade into static very soon beyond Pluto, but if aliens already know of us, why are these cultists trying to amplify their shouts skyward by many millions-fold?

To be clear, many of us retain our fascination with the 'alien.' In particular, I am fairly famous for it! But we are also scientists. Alas, this 'active SETI' cult no longer uses scientific method or thinking and needs to be seen for what it is. Moreover, NBC exhibited shallowness and may have done real harm, by not seeking to understand the cult-like nature of Seth's movement.

Again, I gave a link to our long list of complaints, not one of which - alas - this cult has ever answered.

== Artemis redux ==

Again, my objections to a U.S. Footprint Stunt on the moon do not extend to robotic parts of the program!  NASA should very much strive for a leading role in robotic lunar exploration and actual, actual science.  For example: “Over the course of 10 Earth days (one lunar day), Lunar-VISE will explore the summit of one of the Gruithuisen Domes. These domes are suspected to have been formed by a sticky magma rich in silica, similar in composition to granite. On Earth, formations like these need oceans of liquid water and plate tectonics to form, but without these key ingredients on the Moon, lunar scientists have been left to wonder how these domes formed and evolved over time.”

Robotic exploration of lunar polar ice fields? That too!  And suspected lava tubes. 

What we do not need to do is humiliate other nations eager to send their astro/cosmo/taikonauts for symbolism-drenched national rites of passage. Let them have their ‘bar moonzvahs.’ We have other business farther out, worthy of grownups.

Onward to... the asteroid belt, location of vast wealth for planet Earth.

Life in the cosmos: reflecting on SETI

I have studied and listened and written extensively - in fiction and nonfiction, for most of my life - about SETI, METI and life in the cosmos. For decades I have refused to glom onto premature conclusions or "Aha! This must be it!" declarations. Though new information or insights by others can change how I rank-order the possibilities.

In discussing the possibility of alien life, the UK Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, pretty much describes one of the plot lines in my novel Existence in this article: Why Intelligent Extraterrestrials are more likely to be artificial than biological. He notes, "I’d argue it would even be worth looking for traces of aliens in our own solar system. While we can probably rule out visits by human-like species, there are other possibilities. An extraterrestrial civilisation that had mastered nanotechnology may have transferred its intelligence to tiny machines, for example. It could then invade other worlds, or even asteroid belts, with swarms of microscopic probes."

And yes, I agree with Martin, which is one more reason we should emphasize missions to asteroids over the sterile-poison and almost useless (in the near term) Luna. (That sandbox should mostly be left to the kiddies - with some important exceptions.)

Here's one explanation for alien behavior, curtesy of Candorville by Darrin Bell. I've discussed the "cat laser hypothesis" in my posting: What's really up with UAPs/UFOs?  Another take can be found in my story Those Eyes.

== They keep getting fuzzier. Why would ‘aliens’ do that? ==

Eray Ozkural shares “UAP” footage he took last June, showing glowing dots dancing over waters near the Princess Islands, darting about and occasionally causing explosion-like airbursts. The latter phenomenon I’ve not seen before and it’s worth a viewing. Still, instead of refuting my “cat laser” scenario, these airbursts only re-double the likelihood of that explanation! 

Alas, zealots keep repeating the fundamental assumption that these are 'objects' experiencing 'propulsion', and hence, since the movements seem to violate Newton, inertia, and even Einstein, they must be super-advanced alien ships. 

Alas for that scenario (and I have spent my life exploring concepts of the ‘alien’, including many decades involved in SETI), what I see there has NONE of the properties of an actual, physical 'object' and all properties of an excited patch of atmosphere! A compact patch (of probably excited plasma) that glows and occasionally causes air detonations. 

What always lingers in the air, after one of these sightings, is one of the several key questions that I ask in my most recent UAP/UFO posting, which is why do these sightings keep getting fuzzier and fuzzier, now that there are approximately a MILLION times as many active cameras as there were in the 1950s? 

I'm not the only one discussing this vexing (actually damning) paradox. See this appraisal.

Then there is the locale, once again over an ocean where the real 'objects' doing all this – presumably ships on the water - aren't being watched by any of the people aiming cameras at this blatant example of a 3D cat laser.  

Of course the crews of those ships aren’t posting videos. I bet they are too busy messing with us.

Good kitties. Oh, you funny kitties, chase the spot! Chase it!

== Oh, it gets much worse! We're being messed with. ==

Oh. While we’re at it… and not a lot dumber than UFO fetishism… Flat Earthers are doing what all of that ilk do, when refuted... doubling down on the mystical inanity. In a blatant hearkening to Teutonic (Yggdrasil) mythology (a romanticism that then fed right into naziism), this latest hate-science chant-incantation spends 90 minutes persuading more of the gullible than you'd believe possible. “Flat-Earthers Have a Wild New Theory About Forests: What it means to believe that “real” trees no longer exist.”  

Oh and what's with "birds are fake?"  

Only one thing makes these - and political - cultists flee. 

Demands for cash wagers. 

Watch them vanish, poof, like magic!

== Planetary protection provisions ==

A highly controversial proposal may be overdue… to allow careful relaxation of some ‘planetary protection’ rules for spacecraft sent to certain parts of Mars where instruments show no substantial presence of water ice or brines near the surface. 

“Such regions could include a significant portion of the surface of Mars, because the UV environment is so biocidal that terrestrial organisms are, in most cases, not likely to survive more than one to two sols, or Martian days. For missions that access the subsurface (down to 1 meter), regions on Mars expected to have patchy or no water ice below the surface might also be visited by spacecraft more relaxed bioburden requirements, because such patchy ice is likely not conducive to the proliferation of terrestrial microorganisms.”

Erring on the side of caution is good and wise! We stand on a mountain of our ancestors (oft well-intended) mistakes! Still, it is worthwhile seeking a path that still enables forward movement.

== An age of wonders! ==

Earlier in 2021 we watched robots scoop asteroids and Perseverance land on Mars and a tiny helicopter fit over the Red Planet... and so much more!

Oh, and see fabulous video of how the Webb Space Telescope will unfold...

... and a list of amazing space endeavors we hope humanity will accomplish in the coming year.

And yes, we are amazing, accomplishing wonders through goodwill, cooperation, FAIR competition and science and - above all - citizenship. Which is why enemies try so hard to get us at each others' throats. 

Let's defy them and make a better tomorrow. Start by opening a window and shouting "I am NOT 'mad as hell' and I refuse to let you lure me into that self-destructive trip!"

May 2022 be your best yet! And the worst of all that follow.

Sapience in the cosmos - and the 'Great Filter'

I don't know which is more amazing, the fact that you and I are members of a civilization that does incredible things like this... or that you and I are members of a civilization that lets its morale get pummeled by fear merchants, when we have things better than every generation of our ancestors... or that anyone who is a member of a civilization that creates things like this spacecraft could ever say "we can't."

I feel that people all over the world badly need perspective. The perspective of 6000 years of macro human societies that were 99% brutal, feudal despostisms, against which our island of enlightenment has been... and remains... blindingly bright, by comparison...

... the perspective of a million years of human evolution, in which the normal pattern for male mammals got genetically modified enough so that half of us can actually behave according to the high standards of decency now summoned from us... 

... and especially the perspective of a huge - possibly the biggest - question of all...

Is there life out there? How would we know.... 

== How to communicate? ==

In Why intelligent extraterrestrials are more likely to be artificial than biological, UK Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees points out, "I’d argue it would even be worth looking for traces of aliens in our own solar system. While we can probably rule out visits by human-like species, there are other possibilities. An extraterrestrial civilisation that had mastered nanotechnology may have transferred its intelligence to tiny machines, for example. It could then invade other worlds, or even asteroid belts, with swarms of microscopic probes." 

... which is one of the plot lines explored in my novel Existence.

Perhaps they are everywhere? British physicist Terry Rudolph believes aliens could be communicating through starlight, by hiding messages in modified light that would appear like random blinking to anyone else listening in. Now mind you this is in the Daily Mail and hence guilt by association!  Still, the basic idea is solidly founded in “steganography” – the fact that secret information can be hidden in innocuous images or photographs, needing a key to even know it’s there.  The quantum entanglement portions of this concept seem ornate and questionable. But hey, sci fi authors have worked with far less! 

"Would we recognize an extraterrestrial message if we received one?" This essay by D. Oberhaus and C. Early pushes the idea that limited human beings would be inherently incapable of understanding… or even defining as intelligent… any signals from advanced alien civilizations. 

 I call this yet another example of ‘humility chic,' and while it’s good to goad ourselves that things change (a century ago folks spoke of communicating with Mars via controlled forest fires) the core point of the article is pure drivel. 

(1) Most scientists share the values of the article's authors, constantly questioning the envelope of perception. And hence, where do these fellows get off, lecturing as if they are the inventors of assumption-questioning? 

But more importantly…

(2)… the question is not what humans can perceive, but whether more advanced beings would find us interesting. And if some of them did find us interesting… even some subclass of them who are as rare and exceptional as human entomologists fascinated by ant colonies… they would thus do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to communicate with us. 

Moreover, newly sapient tech species are not common as ant colonies on Earth! 

Again, the most frequent possible rate of appearance of new sapients like us in the galaxy is in years, per. Hence mathematically, it is almost impossible for the only sapient tech species to erupt in any galaxy during a specific century not to be interesting and worth study by super-rich, super-advanced beings. 

Again, we study ant colonies... not all of us and not all ant colonies… but if a new insect colony only showed up on Earth once per century? Then some humans would rush to study it.

== More about the ‘Great Filter”? ==

Robin Hanson, Milan Circovic, Anders Sandberg and others have issued a paper - If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare - proposing a variant on the Fermi Paradox, suggesting that humans on Earth are very early, as Breakout Sapient species go. 

“If life on Earth had to achieve n 'hard steps' to reach humanity's level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the n-th power. Integrating this over habitable star formation and planet lifetime distributions predicts >99% of advanced life appears after today, unless n<3 and max planet duration <50Gyr. 

"That is, we seem early. We offer this explanation: a deadline is set by 'loud' aliens who are born according to a hard steps power law, expand at a common rate, change their volumes' appearances, and prevent advanced life like us from appearing in their volumes. 'Quiet' aliens, in contrast, are much harder to see.”

I have commented on this, that there are many factors often overlooked: I have long held that the top candidate for most-rare event along the Drake sequence is the appearance of a successful technological civilization. Among the following reasons, only #1 is widely discussed:

0 - Life itself is arguably an easy step since it appeared on Earth soon after the seas cooled. Metazoan-complex life took another 3.5 billion years, so that qualifies tentatively as a hard step.

1- Across 4+ billion years that life flourished on Earth, 'breakthrough sapience' in which a species is capable of rapid self-reprogramming of its operating system only appeared during the most recent 50,000 years. (I argue preceding humans were not organically capable of this.)

2- In contrast, "pre-sapience" of a level attained by apes, sea lions, parrots, crows, cetaceans, elephants and many others would seem to be extremely common.  Environmental over-exploitation is also seen among many species (e.g. goats). 

3- If these two trends were augmented by basic tools like fire or weapons, human style environmental exploitation/degradation could easily burn out a planet without any of the human self-critical awareness that led humans to environmentalism, just 10,000 years after becoming environmentally dangerous. If most sapients come to that awareness more slowly, they might degrade their worlds long before achieving technological breakout. (In fact, it is still an open question whether we will do that, even with our quick ascent to insight.)

4- Earth skates the very inner edge of Sol's circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ). This had two consequences:

-(4a) a Gaia balance with extremely low CO2 levels and likely low sea levels for a watery world, hence more continental land area,

-(4b) less time for a homegrown sapient race to achieve breakout, as the sun gets hotter, pushing out the CHZ (Earth may only have another 100My before runaway greenhouse ensues.)

Option (4a) suggests that Earth was more likely than average - for an open sky* water world - to develop sapients with hands and fire. Meanwhile, (4b) suggests that Earth made us barely in time, and that other open sky water worlds would have more time, but higher sea levels, less land and more CO2.

5- The inherent attractor state of male reproductive strategy - stealing reproduction from other males - is seen across the animal realm. In humans after 12,000 BCE it manifested in rampant feudalism, dominating 99% of agricultural societies and at some level nearly all tribal ones. 

The rare exceptions - mostly "Periclean enlightenments" - are vastly more productive in science, technological advancement and governance, as well as environmental awareness. But these exception/attractors are also difficult to maintain, requiring sapience and satiability levels that may be rare out there. Hence, feudalism - accompanied always by rampant mal-governance - seems likely to be a near-lethal attractor across the cosmos. 

I deem this likely to be a huge part of the overall Great Filter vs. successful sapience. I could go on. There are many more aspects seldom examined.  But I look forward to seeing the paper.

     *Most of the likely water/life sites are "roofed worlds" like Europa. They probably pervade the cosmos.

Finally....

And - if aliens are identified....NASA recently issued a Call for a framework for reporting evidence for life beyond Earth, noting "it is essential to open a community dialogue about how to convey information... that has a high potential to be sensationalized."

And yes, people continue to discuss and argue about my alternative hypothesis for UFO/UAP phenomena as 'cat lasers.'