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mk  ·  4343 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Moore's Law Applied to Evolution: We May Be First Advanced Species in Milky Way

Here's the PDF.

Perusing through it, they seem to say more than just that.

At first glance, it seems to boil down to whether or not their measure of complexity is a valid one, and if this complexity maps to current known evolutionary timescales. Evolutionary genetics gives us data for this as far as I know.

Their measure of complexity is:

    measured by the length of functional non-redundant DNA per genome counted by nucleotide base pairs (bp), increases linearly with time (Sharov, 2012).

Sharov is one of the authors here. Here is the source cited, it's a slide deck and the last two slides are basically the figures in this article.

Although the idea would be a very satisfying way to deal with the apparent celestial silence, since the authors couldn't find a better source for a measure of complexity, it's my guess that that they just have that slope wrong.