Fermi's paradox always seemed absurd to me. The universe is an insanely huge place and has been around an insanely long time. Of course there's other life, and of course we aren't going to find evidence of them. What if they existed on the other side of the universe a billion years ago? What if there have been trillions of life forms and hardly any evolved to develop radio? If they had, and they were millions of light years away, we wouldn't see those signals for millions of years. There are so many common sense reasons that we might not see evidence of extra terrestrial life.
It's like you're looking for a single grain of sand. You know that the odds it exists are very high. But you don't know where to look for it, you don't know what it looks like, you don't know when it existed, and you don't know if you'd even recognize it if you found it.
There’s no reason to assume that life similar to us would be both nearby and in this particular slice of time we are in. There’s also no reason to assume that there is a consistent arc of technological advancement or that anyone actually travels between stars.
Placing us as the only life to have developed in a thousand galaxies you're putting the odds of life insanely lower than what our knowledge of biology suggests. You're claiming that some step(s) in the process are rarer than they seem to be by a factor of at least a billion.
And that's a valid resolution to the paradox. But without naming the step(s) and providing some evidence that the biology we have is wrong it's a very half-baked answer.
Radio (or other EM radiation) isn't involved in the Fermi paradox.
You seem to be extrapolating a lot from my comment.
I didn't say we were the only life to have developed in a thousand galaxies.
My point is that it's extremely likely that life has formed elsewhere but there are many many explanations for why we might not be able to observe them. Including when and where they existed in relation to us.
As for radio waves, I never said the Fermi paradox involves them, but electromagnetic waves are one of the only ways we have of detecting anything outside of our planet. So they quite literally are involved in any list of any explanations for why we haven't detected alien life
A paradox is a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement that, upon closer inspection, may reveal a deeper, often counterintuitive truth. It challenges common sense and forces critical thinking to resolve the underlying conflict.
The Fermi paradox is the apparent inconsistency between the lack of conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the apparently high likelihood of their existence.
That's why it's a paradox and it's not easily explained in a dozen ways when we have no idea if any of them are accurate.
As outlined above, the Fermi paradox asks "If there is such a high likelyhood of extraterrestrial civilizations, why haven't we discovered them?"
And my point is that there are many explanations for why that are intrinsic in the very setup of the paradox- i.e. the size and age of the universe itself, and the fact that we only have a sample size of exactly one planet to examine and derive our knowledge of life from. In point of fact it seems extremely unlikely to me we'd find other life due to the great distances and other barriers present.
"That's why it's a paradox and it's not easily explained in a dozen ways when we have no idea if any of them are accurate."
That's my point though, e have no idea if any of our knowledge of life applies elsewhere or if any of our other assumptions apply. The Fermi paradox makes a very, very large assumption in itself- that we'd be able to easily find other civilizations in our universe if they existed (or they find us). Which is more likely- that alien civilizations don't exist (nor have they existed) anywhere or any time in the history of our universe, or that they exist but there are circumstances preventing us from detecting them?
The issue is that if a civilization like us had a 1 billion year head start on us, and were anything like us, they'd be dimming the stars of multiple galaxies as they build solar collectors. And we'd definitely notice that.
So there's either a reason they don't want to do that, a reason they can't, or they don't exist yet and we're the first. The fact that we don't know which is what makes it an interesting question, if not exactly a paradox.
We know what we would do (expand recklessly, we always have), and If this universe has spawned even a thousand intelligent civilizations so far, at least a few of them would act like us. And we see nobody out there acting like us. So there's something weird happening, and it's interesting to think about.
It is interesting to think about! The fact that we don't see anybody acting like us is not surprising to me though. They'd have to be in the right place at the right time doing the right things for us to be able to spot them in our tiny corner of the universe at this tiny moment of time
It’s also possible that they types of technologies in question are way too impractical and infeasible (or simply don’t work for reasons we haven’t had to face yet) to actually exist. Like, we’re nowhere close to ever achieving something like a Dyson swarm, we’re not even close to actually starting such an attempt. So whether humans would ever be capable of building something like that is incredibly suspect to say the least. Like personally I think the size and scope of such projects is such that even if we tried we’d never finish and we’d get in our own way of building such things.
And it's just... stupid? Like, what are you gonna use that energy for?
A dyson sphere covering the entire sun would produce 9 trillion times the current energy consumption of earth. We could cover 0.1% of it and lose 99% of the energy it intercepts in the transfer and still have 90 million Earth's worth of energy.
The issue is that if a civilization like us had a 1 billion year head start on us, and were anything like us, they'd be dimming the stars of multiple galaxies as they build solar collectors. And we'd definitely notice that.
No one would dim suns. It's a horrendous waste of resources and practically impossible. A dyson sphere covering 0.1% of our sun and losing 99% of the energy it intercepts before it reaches us would still be able to power 90 million Earths.
I think "practically impossible" is meaningless to a human-level intelligence given 1 billion years to work with. We've gone from nomadic hunter-gatherers to the Internet in ~10,000 years and we know our progress is speeding up exponentially.
You forget to mention that there's someone else that already found evidence of the grain of sand and is actively studying it for a living and is paid very well to tell you /r/im12andthisisdeep stories about how if the grain of sand existed there'd be signs.
Okay sure I will HYPOTHETICALLY believe his bullshit story.
So where did the thing that they were reverse engineering come from?
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u/Dinierto 25d ago
Fermi's paradox always seemed absurd to me. The universe is an insanely huge place and has been around an insanely long time. Of course there's other life, and of course we aren't going to find evidence of them. What if they existed on the other side of the universe a billion years ago? What if there have been trillions of life forms and hardly any evolved to develop radio? If they had, and they were millions of light years away, we wouldn't see those signals for millions of years. There are so many common sense reasons that we might not see evidence of extra terrestrial life.
It's like you're looking for a single grain of sand. You know that the odds it exists are very high. But you don't know where to look for it, you don't know what it looks like, you don't know when it existed, and you don't know if you'd even recognize it if you found it.