TLDR: Seem to be a bunch of extra effects which could keep the probability increasing into the future.
Interesting article. That said, I feel like this argument assumes that we don't keep scaling our technology in the future right? If we're early in the S-curve then the most likely time to find them is later on once we reach the steeper part.
I also think there's probably a bunch of maths that could be done with this idea in a more thorough investigation taking into account e.g the extra volume of stars we'd be able to detect different levels of alien intelligence at - you could have the sensor quality flatten off, but because the # of stars is proportional to r^3, the searchable space increases, not to mention e.g the computing power and/or number of telescopes at a certain power level required to search that space.
Yes, I think there are reasons to believe we're in the earlier part of the S-curve, and the uncertainty is compounded by the fact that we don't even know how big the universe is (only the observable universe).
In the end, I settled on something like both the search space and the technological capability are probably exponential, so depending on which grows faster, their ratio either approaches 0 or infinity (i.e. we can never search everything or we have perfectly searched everything).
I'm thus much more confident in the claim that now is more likely than the past (it only requires technological development now) than in the claim that it's more likely at any time (it requires technological development to improve faster than search-space enlargement).
The problem is that there's no way to know where we are in the S-curve with anything like certainty; the actual shape over time doesn't become clear until years after the curve has peaked.
I think the author was right to weight the probability mass in the center on fig 2.
TLDR: Seem to be a bunch of extra effects which could keep the probability increasing into the future.
Interesting article. That said, I feel like this argument assumes that we don't keep scaling our technology in the future right? If we're early in the S-curve then the most likely time to find them is later on once we reach the steeper part.
I also think there's probably a bunch of maths that could be done with this idea in a more thorough investigation taking into account e.g the extra volume of stars we'd be able to detect different levels of alien intelligence at - you could have the sensor quality flatten off, but because the # of stars is proportional to r^3, the searchable space increases, not to mention e.g the computing power and/or number of telescopes at a certain power level required to search that space.
Yes, I think there are reasons to believe we're in the earlier part of the S-curve, and the uncertainty is compounded by the fact that we don't even know how big the universe is (only the observable universe).
In the end, I settled on something like both the search space and the technological capability are probably exponential, so depending on which grows faster, their ratio either approaches 0 or infinity (i.e. we can never search everything or we have perfectly searched everything).
I'm thus much more confident in the claim that now is more likely than the past (it only requires technological development now) than in the claim that it's more likely at any time (it requires technological development to improve faster than search-space enlargement).
The problem is that there's no way to know where we are in the S-curve with anything like certainty; the actual shape over time doesn't become clear until years after the curve has peaked.
I think the author was right to weight the probability mass in the center on fig 2.