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Dissolving the Fermi Paradox by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Toby Ord > "This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke

by yboris 6y ago

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Toby Ord > "This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe" https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

antonvs 6y ago
Thanks a lot for that. It seems like an intuitive result to me, but it's great to have a more rigorous analysis, since people so love to trot out the Fermi Paradox and Great Filter as though they're unquestionable facts.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  Another way one can look at it, I think, is that if there is about one civilization per galaxy, then there are billions or trillions of civilizations, but practically speaking we might as well be alone.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    Right. But there could easily be hundreds or thousands of technological civilizations in the Milky Way, which has a diameter of over 100,000 light years. We wouldn't necessarily have spotted any of them yet, depending on how far away they are, when they exist(ed), what their tech level and orientation is, what's important to them, etc. The other argument people tend to pile on to try to claim that we should have seen something is the idea of expansion via colonization, or civilizations using enormous resources to broadcast messages, but all of these have there own huge set of problems. People try very hard to fill gaps in their knowledge even when it's not really possible to do so.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      Based on observation, I would guess: - Alien megastructures visible at long distances are plausibly not a thing, due to material limitations or something. - But, even very slow expansion into space should have covered the galaxy long ago, so the aliens should be here or in the archaeological record. A possible explanation for the latter is, what if the aliens are everywhere but they don't go near stars? Once you have a kind of generation ship that can function essentially forever in interstellar space, why would you risk going near a star or whatnot? That would also be consistent with the "dark forest" viewpoint.

by yboris 6y ago

antonvs 6y ago

Thanks a lot for that. It seems like an intuitive result to me, but it's great to have a more rigorous analysis, since people so love to trot out the Fermi Paradox and Great Filter as though they're unquestionable facts.

perl4ever 6y ago
Another way one can look at it, I think, is that if there is about one civilization per galaxy, then there are billions or trillions of civilizations, but practically speaking we might as well be alone.
- antonvs 6y ago
  Right. But there could easily be hundreds or thousands of technological civilizations in the Milky Way, which has a diameter of over 100,000 light years. We wouldn't necessarily have spotted any of them yet, depending on how far away they are, when they exist(ed), what their tech level and orientation is, what's important to them, etc. The other argument people tend to pile on to try to claim that we should have seen something is the idea of expansion via colonization, or civilizations using enormous resources to broadcast messages, but all of these have there own huge set of problems. People try very hard to fill gaps in their knowledge even when it's not really possible to do so.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    Based on observation, I would guess: - Alien megastructures visible at long distances are plausibly not a thing, due to material limitations or something. - But, even very slow expansion into space should have covered the galaxy long ago, so the aliens should be here or in the archaeological record. A possible explanation for the latter is, what if the aliens are everywhere but they don't go near stars? Once you have a kind of generation ship that can function essentially forever in interstellar space, why would you risk going near a star or whatnot? That would also be consistent with the "dark forest" viewpoint.