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One of the mainstays of the controversial "rare Earth" hypothesis is the"Goldilocks problem" regarding various parameters describing a habitableplanet, partially involving the role of mass extinctions and other catastrophicprocesses in biological evolution. Usually, this is construed as support forthe uniqueness of the Earth's biosphere and intelligent human life. Here Iargue that this is a misconstrual and that, on the contrary,observation-selection effects, when applied to catastrophic processes, make itvery difficult for us to discern whether the terrestrial biosphere andevolutionary processes which created it are exceptional in the Milky Way ornot. In particular, an anthropic overconfidence bias related to the temporalasymmetry of evolutionary processes appears when we try to straightforwardlyestimate catastrophic risks from the past records on Earth. This agnosticism,in turn, supports the validity and significance of practical astrobiologicaland SETI research.

Evolutionary Catastrophes and the Goldilocks Problem