this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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The more I think about the Fermi paradox, the less interesting it gets. The great filter isn't necessary. It's just the distances.
The distances don't account for the complete, total lack of evidence, though. Our civilization is detectable to dozens of light years at least, if you're looking. And we are looking. So, the others.... Where are they?
Well, presumably more than a few dozen light years away. A few dozen lightyears is nothing on a cosmic scale.
Right, a few dozen light-years is like... Less than a rounding error lol. The Milky Way galaxy alone is like 100,000 light years across, and around 1000 light years thick. If we treat the Milky Way as a cylinder, that's a volume of roughly 8 trillion cubic light years to sift through.
Granted, a cylinder is a massively naive simplification for calculating the volume of the galaxy and probably way overestimates things. But even dropping that estimate down several orders of magnitude, billions, or even millions of cubic light years is still an unimaginably large region to search for life. And that's just one galaxy. There's billions of galaxies (that we know of), and some are even bigger than the Milky Way. Searching through all of that for life, especially when we don't really know exactly what to look for, is a hilariously huge task.
I doubt any civilisation has made intergalactic travel. There are enough worlds in any galaxy that there is very little purpose in venturing to another galaxy. The distance between galaxies is also insane. Even with faster than light warp speeds it would take thousand of years to reach a different galaxy.
I definitely agree. I'm more just talking about the search for life though, not necessarily going for a visit lol. If we somehow search our entire galaxy for life and don't find any, naturally the next step would be to start looking through another galaxy - I'm just trying to illustrate just how massive a search that would be.
It’s easy to say “we’re just separated by time and space” but that discounts why there’s no evidence of current or past life even somewhere close like Mars, where life on Earth formed after the formation of Mars. Why can’t we find simple cell fossils?
It could be that life formation is a slow process, or rare process, so that means intelligent life may be even rarer. To me that means every wasted human life and potential is a crime on a cosmic level. The most precious commodity in the universe may be the human brain, as far as we know.
If there is another intelligent species that develops space travel, then we better hope to God that they’re woke otherwise why wouldn’t we logically expect them to do to us what we do to cows or chickens.
There are habitable planets orbiting about one in five stars. So a few hundred habitable worlds in that range. Why do none of them transmit?
If I'm not mistaken, the habitable means posibility of liquid water. I'm not aware of any of those planets to be truly able to host a life as we know it. It's always either high radiation, toxic atmosphere, tidal lock, or dozens of other things...
And how would they even transmit? We can barely talk to Voyager that's basically on our own front lawn. A planet out-shouting it's own star seems a bit sci-fi.
High radiation, toxic (to us) atmosphere and tidal lock don't preclude life, though. Besides, we can't detect such details at those distances.
If a civilization existed and wanted to be discovered at that range, we could detect their signals. Now I'm not trying to argue that life does exist, I'm arguing that the Fermi paradox still poses an interesting question. So, since we could detect a signal coming from a few hundred to a few thousand nearby planets, why don't we? Is life rare? Is life quiet? Is there no life? Each of the possible reasons we have zero evidence for extraterrestrial life raises incredibly interesting questions that bear thinking about. Why would life be rare? Why would life be quiet? Why would extraterrestrial life have died out, etc.
The argument that the Fermi paradox just isn't interesting is quite frankly bonkers.
"They're just not that into you." --galactic consensus