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I have a very boring solution to Fermi's paradox: interstellar travel is simply very hard. Beyond the reach of any civilization, no matter how technologically a

I have a very boring solution to Fermi's paradox: interstellar travel is simply very hard. Beyond the reach of any civilization, no matter how technologically advanced. Or maybe, just within the reach, so that advanced civilizations will occasionally travel to neighboring stars, but this results in a very small minority of all the stars in the galaxy being populated, and we are not close to any of these. Oh, as for intergalactic travel, I'm close to 100% certain it is way beyond the capability of any civilization. It's very hard to imagine intelligent beings with an attention span of millions of years.

crazygringo 7y ago
And not just hard, but without any clear payoff. We're evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on Earth. We love a blue sky, room temperature, certain levels of gases in the atmosphere, and so on. It takes very little work to live here, relatively speaking. Living long-term in outer space and other planets means either forgoing most of the things that make people happy, or else attempting to recreate them in incredibly incredibly expensive ways that ultimately aren't as good. It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer. "What about if we ruin Earth?" plenty of people counter. Well don't. It's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets.
- scribu 7y ago
  What about the payoff of not going extinct if life on Earth gets wiped out by a commet or some other catastrophe?
  - kristianc 7y ago
    Given the last mass extinction was 65 million years ago, this might count as premature optimization.
    - ken 7y ago
      "Last happened 65M years ago" is very different from "happens every 65M years", though. It only takes one impact to ruin your whole biosphere. It doesn't have to be a single cause, either. Some mass extinctions in our history are believed to have multiple causes, or be comprised of multiple smaller events. It must suck to live on earth in those periods, even before the overall event is complete. It's like how you want your wealth to be diversified in a sinking economy even before "A Recession!" is officially declared.
      - kristianc 7y ago
        > It's like how you want your wealth to be diversified in a sinking economy even before "A Recession!" is officially declared. An enormous, gigantic ‘Diversifying Wealth Tax’ would cause you to pause and assess though.
  - apocalypstyx 7y ago
    You get to sit around and wait for the end of the universe. https://www.livescience.com/65299-how-will-the-universe-end.html https://www.livescience.com/65299-how-will-the-universe-end.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Theories_about_the_end_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#...
- _bxg1 7y ago
  This. This is what I want the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world to get through their heads. Real life isn't Star Trek. We don't just need to conquer space travel and then all of our problems will be solved as we unlock scores of fertile worlds. In many, many ways, Earth is all we've got.
  - ken 7y ago
    It was all the dinosaurs had, too, and then it was gone.
    - shantly 7y ago
      Ultra-hardened bunkers on earth are easier and cheaper to build and run than a half-assed Martian colony, and post-impact earth is less shit to live on than Mars. Unless the impactor’s, like, dwarf planet size.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      It's one thing to have a backup plan. It's another thing to downplay urgent problems like climate change because "all we have to do is start colonizing other planets".
- hoorayimhelping 7y ago
  >And not just hard, but without any clear payoff. The clear payoff is: as far as we've seen, life only exists on one place in the universe, so it makes sense to spread it out. Not putting all your eggs in one basket. If you can't see how that's an inherently good idea, I'm not really sure I'll be able to convince you. Your post is thinking on timescales of millennia, at the longest. We know the sun will burn out in a few billion years. We know another 'ice age' is coming in a few thousand years - the entirety of human civilization cropped up in the 10,000 years since the last major ice sheet retreated. We know earth will have some kind of natural disaster, whether it's tectonics or bombardment, and we may not be powerful enough to manage it when it happens. This knowledge alone is enough to justify the cost of trying to get off this planet. >It's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets. "We should fix all the problems here on earth." Every time the idea of building in space comes up. As if we're capable of fixing all our problems on earth linearly and in order before moving on to space, and as if there are only enough resources for fixing the things you think are important. This is the classic, "this solution won't fix the problems we're currently not fixing, so we shouldn't do anything until those problems get fixed."
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - StuffedParrot 7y ago
    > The clear payoff is: as far as we've seen, life only exists on one place in the universe, so it makes sense to spread it out. Sure, if the short term concerns don’t do us in first. You’re talking about an extremely long tail concern in terms of likelihood of human destruction compared to the threats that will come with developing the technology we need for material independence from earth. If history is any guide, colonization does not lead to spontaneous harmony or collectivized thinking. I think the idea is “why are we playing with technology we aren’t responsible enough to use yet when the benefits aren’t clear”. Take the story recently about SpaceX launching satellites that are so reflective they obscure the sky: for a company with supposedly with noble intent, they clearly have their own interests which they will advance above our own. In the BEST case, they admit their own blasé ignorance as to the collectivized effects of their actions, and it’s not like they make any secret about serving militaries. If there is a model for “space” research in the public interest, the US and comparable nations have barely invested a tiny drop in the bucket of military investments. I have no faith we’re going to start any time soon.
- elfexec 7y ago
  > We're evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on Earth. We love a blue sky, room temperature, certain levels of gases in the atmosphere, and so on. Yet humans have moved to temperate regions where the weather fluctuates throughout the year. Humans migrated to the coldest reaches of the arctic and the hottest regions of the desert. As much as humans love "home", they also love to explore. We were evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on a tiny portion of the Earth. Most of the places we live today, we had to adapt ourselves and the surroundings to survive. > It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer. I'm sure that's true for some or even many. But there are plenty of people who would rather live and die living under glass domes on other planets. I, for, one would gladly give it a go if given the opportunity.
mellosouls 7y ago
This isn't a solution and is normally considered very early on in any discussion of the paradox. A replicating machine intelligence can presumably be very patient, and an early civilisation evolved into that, or using it to seed colonies or just investigate could have populated the galaxy many times over by now.
- simonh 7y ago
  It’s considered yes, but IMHO it’s often dismissed out of hand without any actual credible analysis. For example, I suspect that any self replicating machine would need to be run by an AI. So it would have to be able to manufacture, from base materials, a computer capable of running an AI and a duplicate of all the industrial mechanisms needed to do that again, from the silicon chips up. That, plus the infrastructure to construct metal foundries, chemical works, propulsion systems, power reactors, the list goes on and on. It would have to be absolutely enormous, and sending it to another solar system is basically throwing it away from a practical point of view. It such a huge undertaking I doubt think anyone has ever seriously done any analysis of hat would be involved. That’s not a good sign, when a task so many people seem to write off as trivial, is so hard that nobody has even managed to do an overall actual engineering assessment or draft plan.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Perhaps you should read Kurzweil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
    - simonh 7y ago
      I have, many of his articles and interviews, and I think he’s way off the mark. Technological advancements follow S curves, not eternal exponentials. Computer technology advancement is already flattening out and no new fundamental advances are anywhere near taking over from the current technical architectures. Aside from which, his work doesn’t actually address any of the challenges I described. He tries to wave it away with the magic singularity wand, but doesn’t provide any actual technical roadmap to AI. I do believe we’ll get there eventually, I’m not an AI denier, but I think I have a realistic sense of the limitations we face given the actual physics of the universe, and the limitations of the materials it’s composed of.
mrmonkeyman 7y ago
I'm sure it is easy. Space is so vast, thousands of civilizations could be traveling all over the damn milky way alone without being a blip on our radar. The vastness of it all is hard to overstate. We are like some random rock on the bottom of the ocean, unwatched by human eyes, for all eternity basically. No one cares. Edit: life being abundant in the universe makes this even more likely. If there's life everywhere no one is going to care about it.
amelius 7y ago
I'm afraid the explanation for the Fermi paradox starts more like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968
Udo 7y ago
> I have a very boring solution to Fermi's paradox: interstellar travel is simply very hard You're probably right, but that's not a solution to the Fermi Paradox. The central question is not why we don't see any spaceships, it's why we don't see anybody. No large scale construction, no radio signals, nothing. A solution to the Fermi Paradox needs to provide reasoning for why nobody is visible. It's not enough to argue that most civilizations won't (visibly) exploit the resources of their home systems, or that the most prudent way to exist in the "Dark Forest" that is our galaxy is to stay very very quiet. It has to address why we don't see anything, meaning that not a single society decided to do this.
pfdietz 7y ago
You seem to be thinking that just a few visits isn't enough. But if interstellar travel is hard, then the best solution to exploring another star system is to colonize it. One trip there, plant the seed of a new civilization, and let it expand in place to explore everything. A very long lived civilization doesn't have to do this very much in order to colonize the galaxy. It can wait for other stars to come near on their own to make it easier. Stars in our area are moving relative to one another at about 30 km/s, with some much faster. If these colonized systems also decide to spread when other stars get close to THEM, then exponential growth can fill the galaxy in 100 million to a billion years.

crazygringo 7y ago

And not just hard, but without any clear payoff. We're evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on Earth. We love a blue sky, room temperature, certain levels of gases in the atmosphere, and so on. It takes very little work to live here, relatively speaking. Living long-term in outer space and other planets means either forgoing most of the things that make people happy, or else attempting to recreate them in incredibly incredibly expensive ways that ultimately aren't as good. It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer. "What about if we ruin Earth?" plenty of people counter. Well don't. It's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets.

scribu 7y ago
What about the payoff of not going extinct if life on Earth gets wiped out by a commet or some other catastrophe?
- kristianc 7y ago
  Given the last mass extinction was 65 million years ago, this might count as premature optimization.
  - ken 7y ago
    "Last happened 65M years ago" is very different from "happens every 65M years", though. It only takes one impact to ruin your whole biosphere. It doesn't have to be a single cause, either. Some mass extinctions in our history are believed to have multiple causes, or be comprised of multiple smaller events. It must suck to live on earth in those periods, even before the overall event is complete. It's like how you want your wealth to be diversified in a sinking economy even before "A Recession!" is officially declared.
    - kristianc 7y ago
      > It's like how you want your wealth to be diversified in a sinking economy even before "A Recession!" is officially declared. An enormous, gigantic ‘Diversifying Wealth Tax’ would cause you to pause and assess though.
- apocalypstyx 7y ago
  You get to sit around and wait for the end of the universe. https://www.livescience.com/65299-how-will-the-universe-end.html https://www.livescience.com/65299-how-will-the-universe-end.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Theories_about_the_end_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#...
_bxg1 7y ago
This. This is what I want the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world to get through their heads. Real life isn't Star Trek. We don't just need to conquer space travel and then all of our problems will be solved as we unlock scores of fertile worlds. In many, many ways, Earth is all we've got.
- ken 7y ago
  It was all the dinosaurs had, too, and then it was gone.
  - shantly 7y ago
    Ultra-hardened bunkers on earth are easier and cheaper to build and run than a half-assed Martian colony, and post-impact earth is less shit to live on than Mars. Unless the impactor’s, like, dwarf planet size.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    It's one thing to have a backup plan. It's another thing to downplay urgent problems like climate change because "all we have to do is start colonizing other planets".
hoorayimhelping 7y ago
>And not just hard, but without any clear payoff. The clear payoff is: as far as we've seen, life only exists on one place in the universe, so it makes sense to spread it out. Not putting all your eggs in one basket. If you can't see how that's an inherently good idea, I'm not really sure I'll be able to convince you. Your post is thinking on timescales of millennia, at the longest. We know the sun will burn out in a few billion years. We know another 'ice age' is coming in a few thousand years - the entirety of human civilization cropped up in the 10,000 years since the last major ice sheet retreated. We know earth will have some kind of natural disaster, whether it's tectonics or bombardment, and we may not be powerful enough to manage it when it happens. This knowledge alone is enough to justify the cost of trying to get off this planet. >It's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets. "We should fix all the problems here on earth." Every time the idea of building in space comes up. As if we're capable of fixing all our problems on earth linearly and in order before moving on to space, and as if there are only enough resources for fixing the things you think are important. This is the classic, "this solution won't fix the problems we're currently not fixing, so we shouldn't do anything until those problems get fixed."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- StuffedParrot 7y ago
  > The clear payoff is: as far as we've seen, life only exists on one place in the universe, so it makes sense to spread it out. Sure, if the short term concerns don’t do us in first. You’re talking about an extremely long tail concern in terms of likelihood of human destruction compared to the threats that will come with developing the technology we need for material independence from earth. If history is any guide, colonization does not lead to spontaneous harmony or collectivized thinking. I think the idea is “why are we playing with technology we aren’t responsible enough to use yet when the benefits aren’t clear”. Take the story recently about SpaceX launching satellites that are so reflective they obscure the sky: for a company with supposedly with noble intent, they clearly have their own interests which they will advance above our own. In the BEST case, they admit their own blasé ignorance as to the collectivized effects of their actions, and it’s not like they make any secret about serving militaries. If there is a model for “space” research in the public interest, the US and comparable nations have barely invested a tiny drop in the bucket of military investments. I have no faith we’re going to start any time soon.
elfexec 7y ago
> We're evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on Earth. We love a blue sky, room temperature, certain levels of gases in the atmosphere, and so on. Yet humans have moved to temperate regions where the weather fluctuates throughout the year. Humans migrated to the coldest reaches of the arctic and the hottest regions of the desert. As much as humans love "home", they also love to explore. We were evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on a tiny portion of the Earth. Most of the places we live today, we had to adapt ourselves and the surroundings to survive. > It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer. I'm sure that's true for some or even many. But there are plenty of people who would rather live and die living under glass domes on other planets. I, for, one would gladly give it a go if given the opportunity.

mellosouls 7y ago

This isn't a solution and is normally considered very early on in any discussion of the paradox. A replicating machine intelligence can presumably be very patient, and an early civilisation evolved into that, or using it to seed colonies or just investigate could have populated the galaxy many times over by now.

simonh 7y ago
It’s considered yes, but IMHO it’s often dismissed out of hand without any actual credible analysis. For example, I suspect that any self replicating machine would need to be run by an AI. So it would have to be able to manufacture, from base materials, a computer capable of running an AI and a duplicate of all the industrial mechanisms needed to do that again, from the silicon chips up. That, plus the infrastructure to construct metal foundries, chemical works, propulsion systems, power reactors, the list goes on and on. It would have to be absolutely enormous, and sending it to another solar system is basically throwing it away from a practical point of view. It such a huge undertaking I doubt think anyone has ever seriously done any analysis of hat would be involved. That’s not a good sign, when a task so many people seem to write off as trivial, is so hard that nobody has even managed to do an overall actual engineering assessment or draft plan.
- amelius 7y ago
  Perhaps you should read Kurzweil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
  - simonh 7y ago
    I have, many of his articles and interviews, and I think he’s way off the mark. Technological advancements follow S curves, not eternal exponentials. Computer technology advancement is already flattening out and no new fundamental advances are anywhere near taking over from the current technical architectures. Aside from which, his work doesn’t actually address any of the challenges I described. He tries to wave it away with the magic singularity wand, but doesn’t provide any actual technical roadmap to AI. I do believe we’ll get there eventually, I’m not an AI denier, but I think I have a realistic sense of the limitations we face given the actual physics of the universe, and the limitations of the materials it’s composed of.

mrmonkeyman 7y ago

I'm sure it is easy. Space is so vast, thousands of civilizations could be traveling all over the damn milky way alone without being a blip on our radar. The vastness of it all is hard to overstate. We are like some random rock on the bottom of the ocean, unwatched by human eyes, for all eternity basically. No one cares. Edit: life being abundant in the universe makes this even more likely. If there's life everywhere no one is going to care about it.

amelius 7y ago

I'm afraid the explanation for the Fermi paradox starts more like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968

Udo 7y ago

> I have a very boring solution to Fermi's paradox: interstellar travel is simply very hard You're probably right, but that's not a solution to the Fermi Paradox. The central question is not why we don't see any spaceships, it's why we don't see anybody. No large scale construction, no radio signals, nothing. A solution to the Fermi Paradox needs to provide reasoning for why nobody is visible. It's not enough to argue that most civilizations won't (visibly) exploit the resources of their home systems, or that the most prudent way to exist in the "Dark Forest" that is our galaxy is to stay very very quiet. It has to address why we don't see anything, meaning that not a single society decided to do this.

pfdietz 7y ago

You seem to be thinking that just a few visits isn't enough. But if interstellar travel is hard, then the best solution to exploring another star system is to colonize it. One trip there, plant the seed of a new civilization, and let it expand in place to explore everything. A very long lived civilization doesn't have to do this very much in order to colonize the galaxy. It can wait for other stars to come near on their own to make it easier. Stars in our area are moving relative to one another at about 30 km/s, with some much faster. If these colonized systems also decide to spread when other stars get close to THEM, then exponential growth can fill the galaxy in 100 million to a billion years.