I'm not sure that's relevant - the fact that we can detect enough earth-ish sized planets to reveal a consistent bimodal size distribution is compelling on its own.
The issue is that there's some force or factor at play that we don't understand - which means that it can't be modeled. If the behavior was emergent from the physics that we do understand, researchers would likely have recreated that behavior by now.
It's a bit harder than that. We don't understand the effect, so we don't have a good _high level_ model of it. That does not mean we can not model it using more fundamental physics. But of course that leads to much more expensive simulations. And you have to work much harder to understand the output.
That would be compelling if there were planets up to a certain size. However, that's not the case. You have increasingly large planets, a big gap, and then increasingly large planets again. It's a bimodal distribution, which implies some other factor at hand than just the law of averages.
The problem with this (very interesting and fun) theory is that Earth would have to somehow be the very last planet to develop such intelligence amongst the large list of planets within detection range, which seems unlikely.
Well, another option is that it takes - say - 200 years to get from the stage of "we're producing enough radio output to be visible" to "we developed cloaking" or "we switch to other tech that is intentionally or not - not visible".
If that's true, only a very small fraction of planets with intelligent life would land in the window where we can observe them.
Another option is that you might have many civilisations that are just as intelligent, and just as developed, but not in the same fashion - imagine 99% of intelligent species out there are more like dolphins than like humans.
Or their atmosphere is just a bit more hazy than ours, so they are not aware of the night sky filled with sky, so with less curiosity to imagine the world outside of theirs.
Well, if you want to get technical, the major problem with this theory is that MACHOs are not a good candidate for dark matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object#Th... Even if you imagine they were all hiding, their previous effects on the universe are missing.
Another problem is that the effectiveness of the cloaking devices would have to be extraordinarily high across an extraordinarily large number of instances.
looking at the data, it’s like we’re trying our damndest to be last. Defunding education, limiting what can be taught (ex: Texas removing critical thinking), etc all seem like we just enjoy tripping on our own shoe laces
You're focusing on the wrong scale. Intelligence has skyrocketed in the past thousand years. Policy decisions in our lifetime, do not matter or they end all human matters at once.
From earlier in this thread "NAT literally breaks IP". NAT is a workaround. Yes, it's our solution to IPv4 shortage in light of not being able to force the world over to IPv6, but it's not ideal.
So to take a known scale, there is not enough to give one to each person alive. Which might seem crazy but then again, why would everyone not only need an ipv4, but need several (phone, computers, watch, tv,...)? Crazy
Sure, but $20 an hour isn't really "more" than what people are making in degreed professions.
> Then there's overtime, which your salaried white-collar worker doesn't get at all.
Not true across the board - in fact, many mid-paying office jobs are hourly and do pay overtime. I know a bunch of people that worked at AT&T as "salaried" workers, but they still needed to log their hours toward projects, and received 1.5x pay when they worked more than 40/wk, which was most weeks.
Disagree. Motor impairment is one issue, yes, but so is mental impairment. People under the influence of drugs can have poor decision making, even if their motor skills are fine. Driving on meth is still driving under the influence, and those people would generally not have any trouble with a roadside gymnastics demonstration.
There's not another viable test though that can act on a shorter window than that. Companies aren't out of line for not wanting their employees to be working while under the influence of marijuana - the problem isn't that they're being too strict ('zero tolerance'), it's that they don't have a granular test that would suffice.
That, plus marijuana is still illegal in most states. Whatever your personal conviction may be, businesses aren't in the business to turn the blind eye to illegal substance use. They're on the hook for liability.
