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> There's an obvious possibility that people ignore because it's not very sexy: maybe life is common, but sending messages clearly over interstellar distances i
by KnightOfWords 8y ago
> There's an obvious possibility that people ignore because it's not very sexy: maybe life is common, but sending messages clearly over interstellar distances is pointless and extremely expensive.
That's the simplest solution to the Fermi paradox. Perhaps interstellar communication and travel are simply too challenging and uneconomic to be feasible.
- Tepix 8y agoThis seems unlikely. We already know about technologies that seem likely candidates to enable communications and travel between stars. Give us a couple of centuries without global disasters and we will master them.
- shireboy 8y agoDo we? Our physics today suggest there are hard limits. We do have some creative theories (Alcubierre, wormholes) to work around those limits, but they could run into issues and in current forms require massive energy that could well be impossible to generate or harvest. Laser/solar sails seem most likely to me, but could be limited to small payloads and the general vicinity of our solar system. As much as I like sci-fi and real science, it seems quite likely that there are physical limits that keep intelligent life constrained to their solar system. Space is really really big.