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The Fermi paradox really isn't an issue though to begin with. The following is an excerpt from the excellent Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fea
by p_zakharov 10y ago
The Fermi paradox really isn't an issue though to begin with. The following is an excerpt from the excellent Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials:
"The vast majority of search space remains unexplored. Search space does not just mean the three-dimensional volume of the Galaxy. As the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Michael Klein explained, it is a multidimensional
space that includes source location, signal frequency, power level, time of arrival, signal modulation, and polarizations.[9]"
And this assumes that electromagnetic transmissions are what we need to look for. Anyhow the Fermi paradox is like seeing just one straw in an enormous haystack, observing that it is not a needle, and then quitting.
- mrec 10y agoThe Fermi paradox isn't "why aren't we seeing alien civilizations at the specific stars/times/wavelengths/etc we happen to look at". It's "why haven't alien civilizations colonized the entire galaxy by now, using conceptually simple things like von Neumann probes which even our none-too-sophisticated primate brains can come up with?"
- p_zakharov 10y agoI suppose there are now different formulations of the Fermi paradox but if I remember Fermi's original words they were about the apparent radio silence (possibly minus the Wow! signal). Anyhow, the assumption here is that doing so is desirable. I deal with the desirability of doing so (openly) elsewhere in the thread. It's not clear that doing this is the best idea.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mrec 10y agoAgain, though, it doesn't need to be the best idea, it just needs ONE civilization somewhere in the galaxy to have done it ONCE. We can't be the only species with a tendency to derp on occasion.
- p_zakharov 10y agoNot a bad objection then. Of course it depends on probabilities and assumptions we have no real way of assessing.
- joe_the_user 10y agoBut present day human civilization on earth would in fact be entirely invisible to a human-level civilization even one star over. To be surprised that radio transmission is not ubiquitous, you have to say that "louder" civilization should evolve but we so-far have no real proof such civilization are possible at all, since we are not at such a level - and indeed the idea that civilizations would take this trajectory is entirely hypothetical.
- p_zakharov 10y ago"But present day human civilization on earth would in fact be entirely invisible to a human-level civilization even one star over." Really? I find that surprising. On a related note: http://www.lightyear.fm/ http://www.lightyear.fm/
- joe_the_user 10y agoRadio energy dissipates by square of the distance to a location - essentially as a transmission expands, the same amount of energy is spread evenly around a sphere of increasing area. Area of a sphere centered at the sun and encompassing the nearest star is vast.
- p_zakharov 10y agoOh yeah, true that, I thought the signal would be faint several light years out for omnidirectional signals, like FM radio and TV, I just didn't think it would be undetectable. I mean I assume that Contact was pretty scientifically tenable and that had aliens sending back transmissions of Adolf Hitler on television and that was over a much greater distance, but I'm willing to change this belief. This, BTW, is why I am strongly in favor of optical SETI.
- roywiggins 10y agoThe formulation Wikipedia cites is "Where is everybody?" > According to this line of thinking, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial aliens. In an informal conversation, Fermi noted no convincing evidence of this, leading him to ask, "Where is everybody?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
- leakybit 10y agoSorry there's no paradox and math doesn't lie and quite frankly it proves there's a government conspiracy in play.
- amelius 10y agoPerhaps they have, and are too small or too large for us to notice?
- jessaustin 10y agoPerhaps DNA is a von Neumann probe?
- mrec 10y agoPerhaps, but I doubt it. Very dependent on a very specific environment to reproduce, and can't really spread itself to other star systems without evolving intelligent species and hoping they come up with von Neumann probes themselves.
- DenisM 10y agoHighly adaptable though, unlike the mechanical probes. This might be more important in the long run, and might be a good reason to hold the mechanical probes back for the sake of diversity.
- p_zakharov 10y ago[Engineer drinking that black liquid]