Perhaps I should address the 'typical observer argument'; that only works if there is no selection bias when you choose your typicial observer. The 'typical observer' is an assumption also made in the Carter Catastrophe; and I have argued in a different thread that it is wrong to assume that we are typical observers.
Instead, we are observers who exist at a particular point in time, just after the first development of such logical confections as the Carter Catastrophe argument and the Great Filter hypothesis. We could not exist before today, because we did not have enough information and suitable logical and mathematical tools in the past to frame these arguments.
We could not live in a future advanced civilisation with far-flung colonies- because then we would know the answers (humanity survives, and interstellar colonisation is possible) and so we would not ask the questions.
Only in our current state can we ask these specific questions- so we are not typical observers, and that removes the Copernican principle of mediocrity from the argument.
|