4 ms·
The reasoning seem to be "as we don't have enough data, lets conclude whatever I want". The Fermi paradox assumes that if there are aliens more advanced than u
by gmuslera 8y ago
The reasoning seem to be "as we don't have enough data, lets conclude whatever I want".
The Fermi paradox assumes that if there are aliens more advanced than us somewhere for a long time, they should be here by now. Maybe more advanced technology enables interstellar travel (maybe not, maybe is not practical at all), maybe they may not have all our motivations (expansion, technological advancement in our own focus, exponential growth, etc), maybe they don't want to expand or announce themselves because they went cyber or try to pass unnoticed in the dark forest, or things that we can't even imagine yet, as we are not advanced enough.
We just don't have enough data to give a meaningful answer. And maybe never will. The only way to decide if we are alone in the universe or not is actually finding someone else. But with so much outside our physical or practical line of sight we can't just say that there is no one else because we didn't see anything.
- jobigoud 8y agoWhen talking about the Fermi Paradox it's not about what this or that extra-terrestrial civilization might do. It's about what none of them is doing. When you say "maybe they don't want to expand", if you want this to explain the paradox, you actually mean "none of them want to expand". Because if just one did, we would see it.
- gmuslera 8y agoIs not "none of them" but "all the ones that reached certain knowledge level", after you know something, you avoid expanding or showing yourself. The dark forest idea comes from Liu Cixin Three Body Problem trilogy, if you show yourself you risk being destroyed by even more powerful civilizations that are hidden in the dark. And they are hidden because are afraid that the same happens to them, with a third one or with the one they destroyed after they advanced enough. It is not the only possible reason, just one of the possible things that we don't know (or even don't know that we don't know) that can disprove or at least atenuate enough the paradox hypothesis. Can be like explaining a caveman why you can't make a building high enough to reach the moon, so far he knows would be doable and even desirable for us, so why we didn't built one yet?
- posterboy 8y agoWe would see it? Do you have any idea how big the universe is, and how little we see? If there were astronauts on pluto right now, we could not detect them, I suppose -- I might be wrong, but the statement is bound to be true at some order of magnitude that's certainly smaller than the theoretically visible universe.
- mechsquirrel 8y agoThe thesis of the article is not "lets conclude whatever I want" The foundational assumption is that (a) historically people have just picked the values for the Drake Equation that "felt right", and this is wrong, biased, and stupid, and (b) we should not be surprised if the Drake parameters fall in any order of magnitude. So let's Monte Carlo in a log-scaled distribution (roughly). Thus, given what we actually do know, median civilizations per galaxy is 0.32, average is 27 million. Interestingly, this suggests that optimistic Drake Equation parameters must be wrong, lest they create an empirically impossibly-populated galaxy.
- sulam 8y ago>Maybe more advanced technology enables interstellar travel (maybe not, maybe is not practical at all) We have practical interstellar travel today if you don't artificially constrain your thinking to sending blobs of mostly water with lifespans measured in decades.
- maxerickson 8y agoWhat are your parameters for practical? Like, how much mass, how fast, cost, etc?
- sulam 8y agoVoyager-class.