Counting bits was the bottleneck in the genomic scan I co-authored (Kanoungi et al. 2020). popcnt resulted in insane perfomance gains comared to all other methods.
Well actually you are starting to convince me of the opposite.
My horizon is limited to the galaxy. The hypothesis here is that the Earth is an early bloomer in the Milky Way.
Then we are dealing with 1 billion Earth-sized planets, only a fraction of which is orbiting stars capable of sustaining life, only a fraction of which in the habitable hone around their stars... They also need to be in the right region of the galaxy in which heavy stars were formed and died with the right conditions to produce heavy elements. Candidate planets also need to be far enough from sources of gamma ray bursts. And finally, even if they have life, it still needs to develop in the right direction for it to be complex enough and interested in reaching out and colonizing the galaxy.
So, the odds are a billion times a tiny fraction to one, a sustainable hypothesis as far as I am concerned.
I believe I saw a model somewhere, predicting that most habitable planets are yet to form in our galaxy, but I did not bother to look hard enough for references.
There is indeed as far as I know some evidence that we are early bloomers https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2015/news-2015...
Half of the stars might be 9 billion years old, but for heavy emelents fo form, you need already certain conditions like neutron star mergers need to have occured. Our galaxy might be just old enough for that.
I can't quite follow how the "early bloomers" theory would imply either of those two conclusions. What I meant is the concept that our galaxy is young and the conditions just became right for ingelligent life to form, and here we are.
We might as well be among the first ones. I find the idea quite fascinating, it kind of puts the Earth back into the center and makes us special in a way.
> "In the last decade, the field of algebraic geometry was set on fire by “perfectoid spaces” rather than “Scholze spaces” because Peter Scholze kept on calling them that in his talks and papers."
Can't find the source of the quote but it was about the Chinese approach to learning.