Say you’re staying in a hotel with 100,000 rooms.
After a while of being inside your room you start to notice that you haven’t heard any noise from other guests. You press your ear against the wall and hear nothing. You press you ear against the door and hear nothing from the corridor.
What is more probable:
a) You’re the only one in the hotel
b) There are many guests, but you haven’t heard about them yet?
We are probably nearer the origins of intelligent life than we are near the end, because we are in a special set of circumstances at the moment- the set of circumstances where we can ask questions like-
Are we alone?
and Are we going to exist as a species for millions of years?
It is obvious to me that we wouldn’t ask these questions at a later stage in the development of the universe because we would know the answers by then.
This is surely the answer to all those Carter-type arguments (I think).
Perhaps, in a universe with lots of intelligent civilizations, the more advanced ones would wipe out the others. The fact that we’re still alive is only due to the fact that we’re alone!
(Only half joking…)
By the way, there’s also the “Ultimate Anthropic Principle,” which says that the entire cosmos is the way it is solely to support the existence of YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS.
(e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis had to end the way it did; if it had ended in war, you’d be dead right now, and thus unable to perceive the cosmos.)
(Only half joking…)
Trinopus
re: UAP
Makes perfect sense to me. Or at least as much sesnse as the other xAPs.
I just read
“If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi’s Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life” by Stephen Webb.
Nice read.
The 50th solution is his opinion. You are not going to like his opinion 
Don’t read it first, read the first 49 first.
Has this been covered:
Why is consciousness required to colapse the wave functions? A non-conscious animal observing something does not colapse the wave function?
The thing that excites me about the Weak Anthropic Principle is that it might be tested! According to Stephen Hawking this principle predicts that all the cosmological constants that we encounter will have very precise values if they are necessary for our existance, and random generic values if they are not. ( very loose translation/interpretation of what I read )
If verified. this might suggest that this universe is just a randomical mathematical reality, whose only constraint (albeit a big one) is that it MUST develop intelligent life. (or we wouldn’t be here)
This suggests to many that all realitites are possible, and perhaps DO exist.
Another question that pops up in my mind is, … do universes in which there is no conscious life to observe them, exist? Wouldn’t that constitute some sort of, waste? (much like the tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it, nor even ever be affected in any way by it. Not even indirectly)
Chaos:
Warning. Don’t think about this too much. The asylums are already too full.
Heh,… maybe I’ll find lots of “cosmologists” there with which to have interesting conversations.