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For anyone interested in this or related topics I highly, highly recommend the series of 100+ videos in Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur ("SFIA") [1]. Re

• Ataraxy 8y ago
  My favorite channel on youtube. Couldn't reccommend it enough.
• androidgirl 8y ago
  Isaac Arthur is my absolute favorite. Every Saturday morning after I make my coffee, I sit down and am enthralled by this week's video.
• mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  I made this comment earlier but to me the most logical explanation to the Fermi paradox is the vast amount of time between existence of any 2 civilizations. While many could in theory exist in the same Galaxy, the cosmic scale makes it unlikely that any two will ever share the same time scale, thus making any possibility of contact unlikely.
  • pcnix 8y ago
    The argument against this is that a civilization that colonises more than two planets(which a K2 civ could do) has astronomically low chances of getting wiped out, so any that get there first should probably still exist. Which means the time gulf isn't really the problem.
  • cletus 8y ago
    So this is several theories wrapped into one. The Dyson Dilemma (meaning Dyson spheres seem inevitable for civilizations with no more tech than we’re expected to have this century) reduces this idea to civilizations tend to destroy themselves. It’s important to remember that we are not arguing if some if not many or even most civilizations destroy themselves. For this to explain the Fermi Paradox you’re arguing that basically all do and there are lots of problems with that argument. Dyson spheres are not subtle. We can say a high degree of certa8nty that no Dyson spheres have emerged within a billion or so light years of us where light has had time to reach us or we would’ve detected them. Say 10,000 civilizations rose up within that sphere. Even if 9,999 of them destroyed themselves we would detect that 1 tha didn’t.
    • TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      We have been able to derive an immense amount of information about our universe from observations and probes but we're still incredibly ignorant. We can't even determine whether or not there might be a substantial dark body (several times the size of Earth) orbiting within our own solar system. That hypothesis is being used to try to explain other things that remain otherwise inplexicable even within our own 'little' solar system. Grand claims about being able to detect dyson spheres with a billion light years are just silly. And even when we do detect things reminiscent of what might be a dyson sphere there is a very logical and reasonable desire to not accept this and instead look for natural explanations. For instance KIC 8462852 was never fully explained and its dimming continues to this day. The only thing that stands out against it being an 'obvious' dyson sphere is the lack of ambient infrared, which we can attribute to a variety of factors, not the least of which being the all-encompassing 'technology we don't yet know'. But we don't do this precisely because when you start going down this road you can attribute basically anything to 'aliens' in the same way a religious person might attribute otherwise explainable events to a god. The point of this being that unless a LGM walks up to us and says hi, we're not going to attribute anything, seriously, to their existence.
• TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  One problem with things like this is the arrogance of the present. We had no idea that electromagnetic energy even existed until the later half of the 19th century. Even though it had been observed for centuries that lightning strikes could screw with a compass needle, we somehow never managed to put two and two together. Kind of funny in hindsight. Consequently all of our predictions for the future were cast through this lens. So their ideas of futurism was limited to things such as undersea exploration, flying machines, and ideas like covering an entire city in a roof so you wouldn't get wet while walking about. Now we take electromagnetism for granted and can observe it everywhere, as it has always been. Yet the problem with this is that now, in order to have any meaningful discussion of the things of which you're speaking, you have to make the very questionable assumption that there will no longer be similarly revolutionary forces we will discover in the future. And so there comes a question of weighting that. What are the odds of that being true? Our species' entire basis of knowledge is formed, almost exclusively, around observations based on one planet, in one solar system, in one galaxy. Everything else is just reasoning based on incredibly coarse observations of everything else. I think the idea that that we're even remotely close to unlocking the true nature of our universe is not really logical by any measurement other than 'well we're trying really hard and haven't been able to make that next step yet' which has, of course, been true throughout our species entire existence -- until that next step is invariably made. The increasing difficulty does not indicate anything like evidence of approaching an end to revolutionary discovery itself. Yet if we're not at the end then any meaningful big picture or very long term predictions are going to serve as little more than the butt of jokes for those with the opportunity to read such predictions from the future.
  • cletus 8y ago
    The point use that we don't need to assume any new physics or assume any new technology beyond what is considered highly likely for the next century to view Dyson spheres as admission inevitable. We don't even need to assume fusion. New technologies exacerbate this problem rather than solve it. As do new physics. In fact Isaac mentioned multiple times that the inability the apparent absence of evidence of advanced civilizations is the best evidence for there not being FTL travel or communication (as just one example). So while i can agree we don't know everything I'm not sure why it matters.