JCC What's your answer to Fermi's Paradox?

We know more than ever about the prevalence of planets orbiting other stars. We know that there has to be an extremely large number of earth-size planets orbiting their star's habitable zones. And yet... Fermi's Paradox:

Wanted to redo this thread in poll form. Just because.

 

I'm not familiar with Femi's paradox.

 

if nothing else, Fermi's paradox is the answer to "Why do we write/read science fiction."

 

excuse me but you left out my preferred option: "dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed"

 

Why did you make the poll anonymous? Are our feelings that fragile now?

 

It's interesting that one thing that seems to be getting brought up more is that universe in general is ancient, and that it's possible that we're a really late child (so to speak). Even earth is relatively old, and it could just be that we came along a lot later than other civilizations tend to in the course of their planet's history. In short, it could be a lot quieter than it was perhaps several billion years ago.

 

Did I make it anonymous? How did I do that?

 

It's not anonymous-- the votes are publicly viewable.

 

Ah, so they are. Didn't come up for me at first.

Anyway, aliens don't exist you bunch of emo transhumanists. Stop hoisting your bizarre and unorthodox preoccupations on the rest of us.

 

i think you're living proof that they do, wocky

 

So, everyone else is already extinct?

 

No, I don't think so. But, I think there could be a lot more noise in the signal to noise ratio than there was at some point in the past.

 

I see Adam of Nuchtern checked all the boxes. Embrace the paradox!

 

In the TimeRiders book series (highly recommended and spoilers) the Earth was surrounded by a field which blocked out any extraterrestrial signals, which was placed there by an advanced race to study us to see if we were worthy enough to have it removed. If people messed with time travel too much, the suggestion was that it could be kept there permanently or Earth's history erased. Nice concept.

Another theory I've come up with is that other civilisations may use massively incompatible communication systems. What seems like random background noise, could be a message from another planet, but we have no way of interpreting it.

 

I really like this presentation. Discusses the possibility of figuring out whether exoplanet civilizations are destroying themselves quickly.

 

I'm inclined to think that intelligent aliens probably don't exist, but I can't say it for sure. What I can say for sure is that we don't have the tech nor have we had the time to find them.

 

double post

 

If other "advanced" civilizations exist, we're never going to find them. Radio/TV/etc. signals degrade pretty quickly and it would be stupid to assume that easy, quick interstellar travel is possible.

I don't really understand this so-called paradox. It's making assumptions about what the abundance of life "ought" to be based on a sample size of exactly one. And although I lean toward skepticism, we don't exactly have an abundance of observational evidence. A close star system could be teeming with activity and we wouldn't know. It's not as though our telescopes could see people walking around on an exoplanet or spacecraft flying between them.

 

Maybe a sufficiently advanced civilization spends significant resources to hide itself from even more advanced civilizations. We have no hope of discovering them because they are very good at hiding. One of the rules might for example be: don't build a Dyson sphere because anyone watching will see that you're building a Dyson sphere.

 

The current most plausable answer is a combination of our tech is not good enough and the distances are too great. The Arecibo array would not detect our own radio transmissions beyond a light year. I do not know if it can detect radar but our military radar can be detected for dozens of lightyears(or more, I am brainfarting on the range).

Spacefaring slower than light travel makes the distances difficult. Years and decades and centuries pass to get to the nearest stars and even if some danger caused a civilization to leave they might not be close enough for us to detect them and might be anywhere in a very large galaxy(now known to be 150,000 light years across).

Perhaps a dyson brain is 10,000 lightyears away but decided under STL restrictions it did not need to vist when it can process the entire history of human thought in millionths of a second, or perhaps we are the first real intelligence in this galaxy that might get anywhere.

No matter what there is no Star Wars level of technology in this galaxy. Quadrillions of beings that can cross a galaxy inside of a month at a cost of what I would pay for a car in their galactic credits? Someoen would have dropped in to say hello.

I sometimes ask people if one intelligence per galaxy in the Universe sounds reasonable and they agree. Then I point out that it means there are over 100 billion civilizations of some sort in the visible Universe.

So of course the answer really is we don't know, but it sure is fun to talk about.

 

I don't know what to make of it, honestly. On one hand, he's a philosophy teacher and he's great at soccer. On the other hands, he likes Chris Brown and sings soft hip hop.

 

Fermi actually was the alien all along.

 

I don't see how some sort of intelligent life doesn't exist beyond our pale blue dot.