+57 The simplest solution to the Fermi paradox is that space travel is very slow, amirite?

by Anonymous 5 days ago

The Fermi paradox factors this in

by Anonymous 5 days ago

This is correct. The Fermi Paradox is more than just about traveling to meet a distant civilization, it's about the lack of detection or hints of any other civilizations even being out there. There is a whole idea about a self-replicating probe that could be used to colonize/explore the galaxy and by even pessimistic estimations of achievable velocities and self-replication speeds, this could be done in about 300 million years. Give the universe is 13.7 billion years old and the Milky Way galaxy is about 13.61 billion years, this could have been done in about 2% of the time the Milky Way has existed. Given possibilities like this, it's puzzling why we just don't see any evidence of advanced civilizations (or any civilizations) out there.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

An ant looking for a particular pebble on a mountain range. And that's like best case scenario.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Ive always agreed with the idea that aliens haven't contacted us simply because to an alien species advanced enough to figure out intergalactic travel, we look like uncivilized barbarians.

by Hickleliam 5 days ago

I think that if intelligent life is as rare as we expect it to be, any species advanced enough to travel great distances would happily make contact with a clearly advanced, early space faring people. I think that if humans found life in Alpha Centari for example, and we could see that they were equivalent to the early 20th century, we would make every attempt we could to contact them. life as we know it is extremely curious. we see that as a species becomes more intelligent, it becomes more curious.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Think about how rare life is in general. If humans were capable of space travel across galaxies, there's a high probability we would interact with most planets that had life regardless of their abilities. We're doing that now. How much buzz there is around every rock that comes to earth that has "proof of alien life".

by AcademicBalance 5 days ago

But they may want our resources (as is the theme of tons of sci-fi books/movies)

by NeedleworkerFalse 5 days ago

Humans are not advanced enough to do this though. Fermi paradox would suggest by the time we are, we wont. And regardless reaching Alpha Centuri is by no means contradicting the Fermi paradox, its ridiculously close in the scheme of things.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

I'd guess we probably look worse than uncivilized barbarians. We're probably the equivalent of to them of how ants are to us. In other words, not even worth considering in terms of trying to communicate.

by damarisconroy 5 days ago

yet humans still go and study ants and cells and bacterias. everyone shud start using their brains to think more abt that bs barbarian sentiment. EVEN if we were barbaric compared to aliens, what makes you think they wouldn't be interested in studying or communication with us. also aliens r fake as fk.

by clifton10 5 days ago

The fact that particles act as waves until forced to become particles by measurement or interaction, that sounds a lot like how my PC maximizes available resources and conserves power within it's computational limitations. Maaaaybe we're just one of hundreds or even trillions of intricate experiments all designed to solve the one thing that is so far unsolvable to all biological end game life: interstellar space travel. I'm not saying we're a hologram, buuut I'm also not quite ruling that out either.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

We can meet multidimensional beings with the use of certain chemicals.

by ferryaugustus 5 days ago

You are oversimplifying it. Space travel is very slow but space is also very old. If intelligent life survived to develop space travel and artificial intelligence even once, in our galaxy, within the last 500 million years, they could have self-replicating Von Neumann probes around every single star in the galaxy in as little as a few million years, conservatively. Even traveling nowhere near 1% the speed of light-- the milky Way is something like 65,000 light years wide, but your probes may have tens to hundreds of millions of years to travel. 500 million years is also conservative, to give the universe time to age and fuse the necessary elements in suitable amounts for complex life. If life is very common and/or very old, it could be even more likely.

by Abdielframi 5 days ago

My preferred solution to the Fermi Paradox is that the window of observability based on our current technology level is pretty limited. While the Earth has had life on it for most of its existence most of that time was simple single celled organisms. Humans have only existed for a fraction of 1% of the time multiple celled organisms existed, we have only had civilization for a fraction of 1% of the time humans have existed, we have only been broadcasting signals for a fraction of 1% of time we've been a civilization, and technology has advanced to the point where we're transitioning away from broadcasting signals. If you assume our signals, and signals of civilizations at a similar technological level, can only be detected 50 or 100 light years away, it becomes implausible that we would find a civilization at a similar level of technology in this tiny window of time in such a small area of space.

by Obvious_Process9841 5 days ago

I think people really forget this. Time is as vast as space. Like, other civilizations could have risen and fallen on OUR planet and left no trace after a few million years. Look at Venus- we would never even know if an advanced civilization once existed THERE and it's next door. And we've only been searching for a hundred years, give or take a decade. That's nothing.

by tremblaycullen 5 days ago

I mean there are traces from dinosaurs more than 100 million years ago so...

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Buried in the ground due to time, which is difficult to see at X light years away

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Yeah but dinosaurs aren't a galactic civilization

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Isn't it more about radio/other waves that we should be picking up? They don't have to physically travel here for us to find evidence of other life

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Radio waves traveling from andromeda would take 2 million years to get here.How long have we been listening ?

by IslandSudden 5 days ago

Well yeah the civilization may be extinct but that is kind of irrelevant here. Mainly was just pointing out that OP saying it breaks down to to inability to travel at those speeds misses the real point.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Why would the baseline be another galaxy? As far as an arbitrary example of distances that are relevant to this context, that is ridiculous and misleading Entire Milky Way is ~80k light years in diameter and only about 1k light years thick. majority of stars are much closer than that, more like 20-30k light years, which in cosmological terms is nothing.

by Milton79 5 days ago

I mean, the "simplest" explanation is that aliens don't exist.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Yeah, but that is admitting that "life is possible but only this one time, because Earth is so special!" I don"t buy it. If life systems can arise from bubbles and static, or whatever conditions lead to self-replicating matter, it's happened other times.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

When plant life first evolved on Earth, it didn't have any animals to keep it in check. It converted most of the CO2 into Oxygen. We call it the Great Rust, or if you want to be formal about it, the GOE. Took a while to sort that whole situation out. Humans are on track for something similar with their own resources. Whenever something gets too dominant, they use up all their resources and need to start over. So yeah, life probably exists in a lot of places. Life with human-like intelligence though? Pretty rare, and short-lived.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

With what we know of Science, the conditions needed for life and the vastness of the universe makes that nearly impossible. That's just the possibility of life similar to our own, in the vastness of the universe completely different conditions could form an entirely unrecognizable form of 'life'

by Jamalcrooks 5 days ago

That may not be the simplest. If life is inevitable everywhere over time and proper conditions, there would have to be VERY complex reasons why no other life exists.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Simplest != best.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

A few candidate simple explanations: not enough time not enough proper conditions life isn't inevitable And a barely more complex explanation: the time it takes for life to start is much larger than the time that life survives

by Efficient-Grand 5 days ago

Or at least ones capable of, or inclined to, spread to other stars.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Speed is relative to our measuring sticks. What if our whole universe is one organ in a living creaure?

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Bold claim, I'd love to see any source on that.

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Just try it. There's no clear methodology for discovering the probability that, should smart aliens emerge, they invent radio, so you can make up a number. Add enough terms to the equation and you have enough wiggle room to reduce the probability to 0 or bring it up to 1.

by Anabauch 5 days ago

Biden stated that aliens are real andvwe would only knowvthat if weve seen them

by Anonymous 5 days ago

We may have been visited, but not contacted. If an extraterrestrial civ has the wherewithal to find other civs, they would no doubt have a way to cloak their probes or ships to get basic info about us before contact in case we were a little excitable.

by kaciewitting 5 days ago

The Fermi paradox is not a paradox. There is no scientific basis for the notion that life is common enough for us to encounter it.

by dawnlubowitz 5 days ago

I hate that its called a paradoxx

by Anonymous 5 days ago

Time dilation at near light speed means that you would experience a few months of travel, while your destination experiences hundreds, possibly thousands of years. The likelihood of ever reaching another in tact civilization becomes almost zero when you factor this in.

by wendyankunding 5 days ago