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What if the solution to the Fermi paradox is that Einstein was right and nothing can travel faster than light and intelligent life is spread too far apart to no
by jwally 6y ago
What if the solution to the Fermi paradox is that Einstein was right and nothing can travel faster than light and intelligent life is spread too far apart to notice one another?
Our galaxy alone is 100,000 light years across, and we've been able to emit "we're here!" for ~100 years. If someone wanted to respond "neat, us too!" they'd have to be less than ~50 light years from us.
- ceejayoz 6y agoThat's certainly one of the hypothesized solutions to it. Two-way communication certainly has this issue, but it's less of an issue for one-way detection. The galaxy should be awash in "we're here" pings of this nature. Perhaps people only use radio for a while, and it's supplanted by a better communication method we're awash in but unaware. Perhaps everyone collapses after a hundred years or so; maybe when they invent the internet and VR and everyone hops on to waste time and spread disinformation.
- joshuahedlund 6y agoThe general problem with these kinds of proposed solutions is the unlikely requirement that every single civilization out there would follow such a path (i.e. everyone switches from radio, everyone collapses, everyone goes to VR, etc).
- khafra 6y agoThe galaxy is only 100,000 light years across. It's been here for 14 billion years. If it's possible for a planetary civilization to go interstellar, even if they only spread at 0.1C, they would have colonized any place with useful resources thousands of times over.
- PeterisP 6y agoFermi paradox already assumes "that Einstein was right and nothing can travel faster than light" - it's mostly based on the fact that while the distances are huge, the involved time scales are much, much larger compared to the distances. If an inhabited planet sends out a single successful colony ship every 10000 years to a relatively nearby star system (one that's reachable within a century or so at speeds much lower than speed of light) and it takes 10000 years for that colony to develop sufficiently to send out ships on its own, then the whole galaxy would get completely filled in, say, mere 100 million years, a time period that's relatively small compared to the age of planets and speed of evolution. Obviously, that has not happened, since that should be very noticeable even if it would have happened hundreds of millions of years ago - and Fermi paradox is about that.
- jwally 6y agoI never thought about it like that. Learn something new every day. Thanks!
- phreeza 6y agoThe counterargument to that I have heard is that if any civilization ever managed to unleash self-replicating probes in the past couple of million years, we should be able to see those, or their effects on our galaxy. And such probes seem to be not that hard to build, even at our current technology level.
- simonh 6y agowe're nowhere close to building anything sophisticated that's mechanically self-replicating. Imagine how much infrastructure we would need on Mars say, in order to have a self sufficient civilisation capable of building robot probes. They'd need ore extraction and refining, smelting, chemical synthesis for a huge range of materials, silicon chip fabrication. Now package all of that into a single vehicle. The management system alone for all of that under automatic control would likely have to be a functional strong AI and we're a very long way from knowing how to build one of those.