I don't think that's an "often" interpretation, but it is a potential conclusion to draw from it. Yes, you're correct that "someone has to be early, and maybe we just happen to be one" is entirely possible. But that is then something extra you have to include and defend with your theory of interstellar civilization spread.

To put it another way, the theory that most experts would accept right now suggests we should be in the middle of the distribution. If evidence shows we AREN'T, then either the theory is wrong, or you have to defend that "Yep, it's a good theory; we're just unusual."

A more general answer to your question is because it's a principal of astrophysical reasoning ever since the Copernican Revolution. Tradition (and religion) taught that the Earth had a privileged position in the universe. Centuries of subsequent scientific investigation showed that not to be the case for virtually every attribute measured, and so that has become a strong principle that guides scientific investigation in general. It's so rarely going to be true that claiming it is true for a particular theory is very suspicious (and more likely means there's something wrong with your theory).

I don’t know that it is “problematically early.” Life began spawning (or was successfully seeded by an rna universe) almost as soon as was possible given the solar system climate, conditions on Earth, and the sun settling into its calm adulthood — and appears to have done so on a few occasions.

It took a lot of evolutionary pressures and many bottlenecks and divergent paths to get from there to here, complex sapient life.

Is that cosmically early? Likely so. The universe could endure infinitely — and there will be potentially viable white dwarfs for hundreds of billions of years.

And it’s young now, relatively speaking. Just 13.6bn years old, with a lot of these third gen stars conducive to life being far younger than that — 4-5 billion years. Life on Earth started popping up just a few hundred million years after its formation.

Someone has to be first at the end of the day; it could be us. But I don’t see where that’s problematic, given the larger number of proponents who wonder why it hadn’t happened earlier; 13 bn years is “young” but still a long, long time.

The probability that someone is the first is 100%, but the probability that we are the first is (presumably) much lower.

It's like you're meeting a whole bunch of people, and you arrive slightly before the agreed upon time, and there's nobody there. Could be that everyone else is just cutting it close, but you'd expect at least some people to arrive early. It's pretty unlikely that you'd be the first one there. So you start to wonder, are you in the right place? Did you get the date wrong? Did you miss an e-mail?

You are correct that SOMEONE has to be early. The problem is that there is no logical reason why the first intelligent life should just be arising now. Everything we know about the uni verse suggests that earthlike conditions should have been possible since the rise of the Population I stars (modern stars which seeded the galaxy with most of the elements heavier than helium). That was many billions of years ago. It only took humans a couple million years to go from upright apes to escaping our planter's gravity well. There is no known physical barrier to us colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy within a couple million years at most (assuming the light barrier can never be crossed). So, if intelligent life has been possible for billions of years and it should only take millions to fill up the galaxy, then where is everybody? That is the problem with saying we are at the beginning of the distribution. Everything we know says the distribution should have started long ago.

The presence of UFOs seems to get waved away a lot when discussing the Fermi Paradox. That might be a mistake. Even the US government acknowledges UFOs that they can't actually disprove with scientific analysis.

Radio signals also degrade across distance and with external factors, so even if an alien civilization is producing radio signals as part of technological development, the odds of being able to separate it from cosmic background noise might be quite low.

>It only took humans a couple million years to go from upright apes to escaping our planter's gravity well.

Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was: "Oh no, not again." Many have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias thought that, we should know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

> The presence of UFOs seems to get waved away a lot when discussing the Fermi Paradox. That might be a mistake. Even the US government acknowledges UFOs that they can't actually disprove with scientific analysis.

The US government acknowledges UFOs in the true meaning of the word, "unidentified flying object", they've observed flying objects that they couldn't identify as specific enemy aircraft or drones or whatever. They have also stated that they have no reason to believe these objects are extra-terrestrial in origin. source.

Could these be aliens? Maybe, but lack of other explanations does not mean you can just assume they are, as extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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There
is a magic in walking alone, in thinking alone: If there is no one to
contact you around, the universe starts contacting you!

I'm going to stick my head in the ocean and declare that there are no fish because I can't see them!

The assumption problem can go both ways though, if one can not provide evidence to disprove an extraordinary claim.

The very discussion of alien intelligence is within the realm of the extraordinary imo, and I think such discussion invites at least accepting the possibility of the extraordinary when the evidence (or lack thereof) has neither proven nor disproven claims.

> The assumption problem can go both ways though, if one can not provide evidence to disprove an extraordinary claim.

So far there is an awful lot of evidence of no extra-terrestrial life on earth: every single microbe shares the same basic cellular building blocks, and often whole chunks of dna/rna. Lots of cameras, radar, satellites and other sensors everywhere that keep not detecting aliens day in day out. We are incredibly certain that space travel is very difficult and will take a very long time (relativity is an extremely well-tested theory, so we're very sure that nothing can travel faster than light). We are actively looking for it and have not seen a single sign of life outside of our atmosphere. So the claim that there is no extra-terrestrial life on Earth has a lot of evidence to support it.

The claim that extra-terrestrial life has visited Earth goes against much of our scientific understanding, it would require a bunch of well-tested theories in physics to be outright wrong. So it is this claim (and not the opposite) which is extraordinary.

> I think such discussion invites at least accepting the possibility of the extraordinary

As far as I know most scientists accept the possibility of alien life, and more often than not are actually hoping that this is the case. But to be convinced that this is the case, rather than it being an unlikely or hypothetical scenario, would take a lot more evidence than a few hundred (currently) unexplained phenomena. For example, some samples of alien tech or biology.

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How does life appear to have arisen more than once? I thought we had evidence for just one tree of life.

You need to differentiate between independent variables and dependent variables. Your reasoning would be correct if our existence relied upon the existence of earlier civilizations, but it doesn't.

Imagine a bunch of civilizations that all formed independently, across a large span of time. If they all assumed that they evolved at the time in the age of the universe where a civilization is most likely to evolve, they would have a better chance of being correct than any other assumption.

This is why we should assume we are at the peak of the distribution.

You might find that your reasoning is more relevant when it comes to the doomsday paradox.

There is a small amount of credible evidence that we aren't alone, but it is small. Beyond that....

Space and time are so huge that we shouldn't expect an obvious visit in the instant that we have been here. We simply don't have any data to evaluate. We are here. Time and space are huge. That's all we have. Mainly a philosophical discussion since we have no information to evaluate.

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The Fermi paradox is speculation based in ignorance. I looked up and saw no geese so they don't exist. Looked in the lake and saw no fish so they don't exist.

The only intelligent response to the ET question is "I don't know." Not this fantasy nonsense.

Black swan

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Talking about alien life is the same as ghosts or true love: always talked about but never (seldom) seen.

Anyone subscribe to The Dark Forest Hypothesis? That is one possible explanation to this paradox.