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My 2 favorite Fermi Paradox resolutions: 1 - Given that we are only 14B years into a many-trillion-year stretch, our existence now is so unlikely that it's pos

My 2 favorite Fermi Paradox resolutions: 1 - Given that we are only 14B years into a many-trillion-year stretch, our existence now is so unlikely that it's possible that we actually are the first. Something has to be first. 2 - Aliens are everywhere, but we cannot perceive them for reasons we would find disturbing. Largely, for the same sort of reasons that cave fish cannot see light or that most species are apparently unaware of humans in their environment. Essentially, that there is no evolutionary reason for humans to perceive them. As for grabby aliens... meh. I don't find it convincing as a resolution. It contains too many unexamined assumptions, quite like the simulation theory.

dsr_ 4y ago
We don't even have to be first-first, just among the first few thousand and still outside the light cones of any of the others.
DanielBMarkham 4y ago
I'm betting on #2. We only have our own planet to look at, but if we could somehow rank all of the species on the planet according to intelligence, just jumping a couple of levels up or down you enter a completely different world of existence. Or as I like to quip, somewhere in the middle of the ocean there's an island. On that island is an ant hill, and there's an ant at the top of it wondering: Where are all of the other ants? I don't really find it disturbing, though. Our "best practice" to interact with other species is to try to leave them alone and watch them enjoy and live in their habitat. Makes sense that's what we're doing for the alien overlords, and I'm okay with that. Assuming aliens are around somewhere and we're using our own planet to reason by analogy, the only other two alternatives are they're going to subjugate/destroy us or they're going to eat us. Those alternatives are not so fun. I find it interesting that so many humans assume that since we can chat with one another, aliens somehow are supposed to show up and chat with us. It's all about us. If such a thing happened, the history of massively-different cultures interacting on Earth is not a positive one. Given the choices, I'm good.
- rendall 4y ago
  It's nice that someone else gets #2. I often get bogged down with people refuting the notion by pointing out that we are not cave fish and are nothing like cave fish. That we have evolved to perceive everything that can possibly threaten us and that includes aliens.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. Our current physics also doesn't seem to be _so_ wrong that it allows much room for technological societies to hide from our instruments.
    - indymike 4y ago
      > Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. We might be able to perceive, but that doesn't mean we understand what we see. Every time I engage with medicine, I learn how little humanity actually knows, despite all the technology. We still don't understand what causes many diseases, or how to heal many wounds. How would we find completely alien life when we can't even find the cause of a disease that plagues 23% of the adult population?
      - adrianN 4y ago
        The same way we find the disease: by the effects the aliens have on their surroundings.
        indymike 4y ago
        You are missing the point, in our arrogance to believe we understand things, we do not really understand them. The drive to understand more is powerful, and has lead to huge advances, but we still have a long way to go.
        4y ago
oneoff786 4y ago
Humans don’t have an evolutionary reason to see aliens light years away. I don’t see why that would matter
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
  We also have no evolutionary reason to detect aircraft with radar, but here we are.
  - finnh 4y ago
    I think GP is in agreement.
- goatlover 4y ago
  We have all sorts of telescopes that can see things many light years away. Humans didn't evolve to know about black holes, yet we can image them now.
- rendall 4y ago
  > I don’t see why that would matter I don't understand what you meant by this part. Matter to what?
deleted 4y ago
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b3lvedere 4y ago
My personal favorite resolution is that we are currently only able to travel in C Space as mentioned in https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... I mean, in this age we are still discovering super strange weird stuff on the atomic/proton/electron/quark scale, so maybe we need a lot of more time to discover other super strange weird stuff on the galactic/universe level as well.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
In my understanding the only hard assumption in the grabby aliens hypothesis is that there is a chance of a civilization becoming "grabby" by which they mean it sprouts new civilizations in neighboring solar systems. Everything else is just necessary simplification. It even accounts for civilizations not becoming grabby. And the grabby hypothesis predicts we are quite early.
weatherlight 4y ago
that's interesting. "Grabby aliens" asserts that we are early, like point 1.
- Serow225 4y ago
  https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/02/humans-are-early.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/02/humans-are-early.html
virtualritz 4y ago
> 2 - Aliens are everywhere, [...] As a teenager I read Heinlein's 'Goldfish Bowl' [1] and it was the best explanation apart from the one from Stanislaw Lem I had heard for the lack of aliens. Namely that: you can't 'see' them because they're just too different. Heinlein doesn't even make it clear if the higher intelligence in his short story are aliens or from Earth. I think Lem's explanation (don't remember in which book/short story of his) was that the window where a civilisation is not advanced enough to learn something from aliens but not too advanced to care is just sth. like 3000 years. And therefore, even if this level of development was reached by two proximate civilizations, e.g. even on neighboring planets in the same solar system -- if those windows didn't overlap, chances for communication happening would essentially be zero. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfish_Bowl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfish_Bowl
PeterisP 4y ago
Given that our planet is younger than most planets in our galaxy, and IIRC younger than the average of all the planets which will be in our galaxy, we are the first if and only if we are the only intelligent life which will ever form in our galaxy. I'd strongly disagree with the notion of "we are only 14B years into a many-trillion-year stretch" - we're at or past the midpoint, half or more of all the possible potential-life-forming-events in our galaxy have already occurred.
- GolfPopper 4y ago
  >we're at or past the midpoint, half or more of all the possible potential-life-forming-events in our galaxy have already occurred Caveat: for life that resembles life on Earth. Admittedly that's the only kind of life we're certain exists, but more or less alien forms of life seem to be at least theoretically possible. (Which gets into whether we'd even recognize each other as life.)
3pt14159 4y ago
First one doesn't really make much sense. There are so many intelligent lifeforms on earth (whales, octopods, birds, monkeys, canines) and intelligent hive-minds (bees, ants, termites) that the leap to exponential tool use doesn't seem like something that would take anything close to 100B years, let alone trillions of years. As for number two, it's hard to comprehend a response that is reasonable because our cognition may be part of the "disturbing reasons" right? The theory I more and more think is probably right is that there is some major aspect of the universe that we get wrong. What is more likely, humans thinking they understand something when they don't or that no life form was able to spread amongst the stars in billions of years? I have plenty of lived examples of humans with false knowledge. It's a sort of meta Drake equation. [Likelihood humans are not as wise as they think they are]*[rest of drake equation] and I think the drake equation, as stated, correctly leads to the term "Paradox" given the conventional understanding of science as communicated by scientists.
- funklute 4y ago
  > First one doesn't really make much sense. There are so many intelligent lifeforms on earth ... that the leap to exponential tool use doesn't seem like something that would take anything close to 100B years, let alone trillions of years. I don't quite understand your logic here? The big barrier(s) doesn't seem to be tool use, but rather 1) the formation of life itself, and then 2) the move from single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms (this took 2 billion years on earth, so is clearly a very difficult step).
  - 3pt14159 4y ago
    I'm sleepy from a bad night, but let me try to explain: > our existence now is so unlikely that it's possible that we actually are the first. Something has to be first. When the OP said that ^ I took we to mean humans with technology, presuming the OP meant that we were somehow special. Basically I took it as him saying that we're first because we're lucky so my argument was: > How are we lucky? Look at all the other intelligent lifeforms on Earth! Surely the lucky winners would have had some sort of fluke that made them one of the few with intelligent brains on their planet! This could have easily happened sooner on Earth! If the OP meant that life itself was extraordinarily rare on any given celestial object then that is something I don't consider especially groundbreaking since its part of the Fermi Paradox formula in its basic form the precise value of which has been debated for years and I do not find convincing.
hindsightbias 4y ago
Studies say we are 5 Gigayears late to the party. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07902 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07902
__alexs 4y ago
(2) is just theism with extra steps.
- joshuahedlund 4y ago
  I think you are on the right track. I would say it's more like "alien-of-the-gaps".
seer 4y ago
Obligatory XKCD, explaining resolution 2 with ants :) https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/
- joshuahedlund 4y ago
  The problem with the analogy is assuming that humans are the only living things for the ants to find! (An ironically human-centric error in an attempt to expose human-centric thinking) The analogy would be more accurate if the two ants had scanned everything in a one-mile radius and found zero other insects anywhere, which would be... a little curious...
wing-_-nuts 4y ago
I think 'we're first' is unlikely, but the universe is so unimaginably large that we could well be first in the little bubble we can readily observe. Alternatively, another civilization has come and gone, and we've yet to spot it's remnants. I don't buy the whole idea of 'we just can't see them'. We're very good at detecting signal from our physical world, and any advanced civilization is going to be noticeable as they start harvesting the power of nearby suns. Maybe you're right though, maybe 'dark matter' is the mass of other multiverses and gravity is the only force that bleeds through.
dividedbyzero 4y ago
3 There is big cost or downside to galaxy-wide expansion that we don't get and that limits expansion, like travelling interstellar distances being far harder than we imagine in practice. 4 We are weird in that we want to expand like this, but others don't, similar to how chimps appear to be well able to express themselves in sign language, but appear to simply lack any urge to do so. Similar to your #2. 5 There simply isn't a compelling reason to expand galaxy-wide by the time you can. Reproduction must be stabilized in some way if mortality is taken out of the equation, which will probably happen earlier, a sufficiently advanced understanding of cosmology and physics might conclude there isn't any danger that can't be managed or that spreading out over a few lightyears wouldn't guard against sufficiently well. Getting rid of evolutionarily helpful urges that become a burden in a post-evolution world might be a filter by itself, so this is similar to your #2 in that they're different in a way we can't easily conceive. 6 Once you can make any existence you want happen (by some kind of unimaginably advanced VR) and have tech keep everyone safe and alive indefinitely, the actual universe might start to seem underwhelming. Better to live out the millennia in a perfectly convincing hedonistic metaverse. I could see that happen to us, come to think of it.
- jandrese 4y ago
  > 3 There is big cost or downside to galaxy-wide expansion that we don't get and that limits expansion, like travelling interstellar distances being far harder than we imagine in practice. This is my thought. Without FTL travel you have to go the slow way. Probably much less than C thanks to the rocket equation. But in order to do this you need to build a spacecraft capable of surviving for centuries or longer with absolutely no outside support, not even solar power. But if you can build that you have effectively unlimited space in your own solar system. Why bothering to travel to a different solar system at that point? Maybe if you have used up literally all of the resources in your current solar system, but that's a multi-billion year process. So you might only need to make the trip once or twice in the current age of the universe. But even that seems less likely than just developing really good recycling systems. So the solution to the Fermi paradox is that by the time you have the tech to travel between solar systems there is no longer any need to do so.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Every time you see someone saying Earth is rare in some way, or that the Great Filter is behind us, or that life is plentiful, but far away (grabby aliens being one of those), those are all the same argument, and the exact same argument as your #1. It is still missing any justification for what is so rare about it. (Not that those arguments are any hard to make; instead the main question here is which of them is the correct one.) Your argument #2 (that's the exact same as the zoo hypothesis) needs an extremely good reason for no alien at all trying to kill us and take Earth. And we currently lack any good reason.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Possibly a similar reason we don't kill all the ants to take the sand?
- mmazing 4y ago
  > "Your argument #2 (that's the exact same as the zoo hypothesis) needs an extremely good reason for no alien at all trying to kill us and take Earth. And we currently lack any good reason." Maybe life supporting planets are abundant and there's no reason to risk a conflict with us? We've certainly been detecting a lot of them anyhow. It could be equivalent to me going to Africa to fight a lion for its den instead of just renting an apartment.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    It doesn't matter how plentiful planets are; and it doesn't matter if planets are not the aliens favorite environment. Living beings tend to get at every single place, unless something really compelling is stopping them. (And we have a large history of killing lions to get their habitat. We do lot of that with ants too, and all kinds of insects like the sibling comment seems to ignore.)
- aidenn0 4y ago
  If the Great Filter is behind us, I like mitochondria as a candidate; from what we know of Earth, it took over a billion years to happen, appears to have happened just once, and all complex life has it.
lordnacho 4y ago
Any estimate of how soon life could appear after the big bang?
deleted 4y ago
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captainmuon 4y ago
My favorite solution is very simple: We're overestimating our ability to detect extraterrestrial live. It might be common and look similar to us. They might even use radio signals. But until somebody demonstrates that you can detect stray telecommunications signals over lightyears I find it hard to believe. I also think it is going to be hard to detect the chemical signature of life e.g. via spectroscopy, if you can't even image the planet next to it's overshining star. Second, and somewhat sobering part: I also think it is practically impossible to do interstellar journeys. You can imagine scaling up existing tech to do so. But I think at some point the complexity and cost (in terms of resources, not money) would diverge. As an analogy, you can build a small robot, but if you try to scale it up to a mech it will not work in reality. Too heavy to move, yet to flimsy to stand.
mortenjorck 4y ago
My double-edged Occam's razor for extraterrestrial life: Due to the vast scale of the universe, the probability of other life existing rounds to 100%. Due to the vast scale of the universe, the probability of finding other life rounds to 0%.
- dspillett 4y ago
  Also due to the continuing expansion of the universe, that latter probability will get more infinitesimal for any given pocket of life as time goes on and more & more of what has happens in the universe “escapes” their light-cone.
feoren 4y ago
> 2 - Aliens are everywhere, but we cannot perceive them We can detect neutrinos with advanced instruments. We've never had an evolutionary reason to do that. There's really just no room for this explanation. Energy and mass are one and the same. If we can detect neutrinos, but not these intelligent aliens that are everywhere, it means that they don't occupy physical space, don't have mass (and therefore must move at C only), don't use energy, don't send signals to one another, don't accelerate or decelerate, aren't involved in chemical reactions, don't interact with any of the particles we do, don't perceive light, etc. etc. At that point, they basically don't exist in our universe. It's not enough to say "but ants don't know we exist!" -- first of all, yes they do. Secondly, you're really saying that intelligent ants who formed an advanced society, had a scientific revolution, and built instruments capable of determining the number of moons on Jupiter, still would not know we exist. That is clearly ludicrous. And this doesn't even solve the Fermi paradox! There's clearly plenty of "room" for aliens that are "somewhat similar" to us; that is, they actually are made of protons and neutrons, etc. Where are all those aliens?
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  So many incorrect statements and assumptions... our current footprint would be unrecognizable from few hundred light years to even a bit more advanced civilization looking straight at our Sun. So yes there very well may be aliens just like us technology wise say 200 or 2000 or 2000000 light years away and they nor we simply wouldn't know. We don't know what we don't know from physics, the arrogance of thinking we get it all was there numerous times and it was always a wrong emotion, we even realize it for our current theories. There may be quantum entanglement communication, higher dimensions, strings or basically anything your nor my mind can't even come up with right now. Just like cavemen simply couldn't come up with general relativity even if it was all happening right in front of their eyes.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  Imagine if it turns out sentience can arise in stars, gas, dust, or minerals. Maybe they won't be advanced civilizations, more like animals we can't recognize as creatures even when they're in front of us. We might even start mining them, as eyelash mites mine us without comprehending us.
aaroninsf 4y ago
I also think some version of 2 is overwhelmingly likely. In particular, I have always found the core premises of SETI surveys profoundly naive in terms of necessary preconditions for it to be meaningful. "If your only tool is a giant radio telescope, you look for radio signals." And in specific you look in bands that fit various preconditions of your technology; and then you look for signals which are loosely comparable to the ones we humans used nearly a century ago. The folly of belief that such surveys are likely to uncover unobfuscated communications by some other civilization was truly driven home to me reading here on HN in the last year or two a deep dive into an iPhone exploit that relied on exploiting some issues with its discovery protocols for other devices in the phone's vicinity. The specifics of its multiplexing and frequency hopping and duty cycling across various tasks were hard enough to follow when the priors of the stack and hardware are all very well known. The only signal SETI is liable to see is the equivalent of someone blowing an air horn in a stadium explicitly to be heard. Maybe someone does that. Maybe they find the forest dark enough to not... The more interesting survey IMO is to look carefully for Dyson-sphere style dimming...
mFixman 4y ago
My favourite resolution is that "intelligence" is a concept created by humans that only humans and species evolutionarily close to humans have. It should be called "human intelligence". The Fermi paradox doesn't work because we have roughly the same chance of finding a human-intelligent alien as we have to find a Swedish-speaking alien. For all I know the planet Neptune is actually alive and intelligent in a way we cannot comprehend.
- rendall 4y ago
  > The Fermi paradox doesn't work because we have roughly the same chance of finding a human-intelligent alien as we have to find a Swedish-speaking alien. This is great.
cuteboy19 4y ago
1 is not true. You are actually experiencing dartboard paradox. The probability of the dart hitting one particular point is nearly zero. Yet some point has to be hit by the dart. In the same way, even though someone has to be the first, that does not change the probability of us being the first (which is very unlikely by most estimates of the probability distribution)
rendall 4y ago
I'm not convinced by refutations of #2 that point out that we humans have developed technologies that extend our senses, eg. we can now detect neutrinos, gravity waves, microwaves, what-have-you. While these are extensions of the senses we have, we still are evolved to understand an environment that is an infinitely narrow slice of all possible environments in the universe, and Earth life's approach is an infinitely narrow slice of all possible ways of perceiving and surviving an underlying reality that is vastly unknowable. As we look into a Universe (or even look around ourselves here on Earth) with our sense extenders, we are still bound by the limitations of our cognition and perception.

dsr_ 4y ago

We don't even have to be first-first, just among the first few thousand and still outside the light cones of any of the others.

DanielBMarkham 4y ago

I'm betting on #2. We only have our own planet to look at, but if we could somehow rank all of the species on the planet according to intelligence, just jumping a couple of levels up or down you enter a completely different world of existence. Or as I like to quip, somewhere in the middle of the ocean there's an island. On that island is an ant hill, and there's an ant at the top of it wondering: Where are all of the other ants? I don't really find it disturbing, though. Our "best practice" to interact with other species is to try to leave them alone and watch them enjoy and live in their habitat. Makes sense that's what we're doing for the alien overlords, and I'm okay with that. Assuming aliens are around somewhere and we're using our own planet to reason by analogy, the only other two alternatives are they're going to subjugate/destroy us or they're going to eat us. Those alternatives are not so fun. I find it interesting that so many humans assume that since we can chat with one another, aliens somehow are supposed to show up and chat with us. It's all about us. If such a thing happened, the history of massively-different cultures interacting on Earth is not a positive one. Given the choices, I'm good.

rendall 4y ago
It's nice that someone else gets #2. I often get bogged down with people refuting the notion by pointing out that we are not cave fish and are nothing like cave fish. That we have evolved to perceive everything that can possibly threaten us and that includes aliens.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. Our current physics also doesn't seem to be _so_ wrong that it allows much room for technological societies to hide from our instruments.
  - indymike 4y ago
    > Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. We might be able to perceive, but that doesn't mean we understand what we see. Every time I engage with medicine, I learn how little humanity actually knows, despite all the technology. We still don't understand what causes many diseases, or how to heal many wounds. How would we find completely alien life when we can't even find the cause of a disease that plagues 23% of the adult population?
    - adrianN 4y ago
      The same way we find the disease: by the effects the aliens have on their surroundings.
      - indymike 4y ago
        You are missing the point, in our arrogance to believe we understand things, we do not really understand them. The drive to understand more is powerful, and has lead to huge advances, but we still have a long way to go.
        4y ago

oneoff786 4y ago

Humans don’t have an evolutionary reason to see aliens light years away. I don’t see why that would matter

ImHereToVote 4y ago
We also have no evolutionary reason to detect aircraft with radar, but here we are.
- finnh 4y ago
  I think GP is in agreement.
goatlover 4y ago
We have all sorts of telescopes that can see things many light years away. Humans didn't evolve to know about black holes, yet we can image them now.
rendall 4y ago
> I don’t see why that would matter I don't understand what you meant by this part. Matter to what?

deleted 4y ago

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b3lvedere 4y ago

My personal favorite resolution is that we are currently only able to travel in C Space as mentioned in https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... I mean, in this age we are still discovering super strange weird stuff on the atomic/proton/electron/quark scale, so maybe we need a lot of more time to discover other super strange weird stuff on the galactic/universe level as well.

bayesian_horse 4y ago

In my understanding the only hard assumption in the grabby aliens hypothesis is that there is a chance of a civilization becoming "grabby" by which they mean it sprouts new civilizations in neighboring solar systems. Everything else is just necessary simplification. It even accounts for civilizations not becoming grabby. And the grabby hypothesis predicts we are quite early.

weatherlight 4y ago

that's interesting. "Grabby aliens" asserts that we are early, like point 1.

Serow225 4y ago
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/02/humans-are-early.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/02/humans-are-early.html

virtualritz 4y ago

> 2 - Aliens are everywhere, [...] As a teenager I read Heinlein's 'Goldfish Bowl' [1] and it was the best explanation apart from the one from Stanislaw Lem I had heard for the lack of aliens. Namely that: you can't 'see' them because they're just too different. Heinlein doesn't even make it clear if the higher intelligence in his short story are aliens or from Earth. I think Lem's explanation (don't remember in which book/short story of his) was that the window where a civilisation is not advanced enough to learn something from aliens but not too advanced to care is just sth. like 3000 years. And therefore, even if this level of development was reached by two proximate civilizations, e.g. even on neighboring planets in the same solar system -- if those windows didn't overlap, chances for communication happening would essentially be zero. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfish_Bowl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfish_Bowl

PeterisP 4y ago

Given that our planet is younger than most planets in our galaxy, and IIRC younger than the average of all the planets which will be in our galaxy, we are the first if and only if we are the only intelligent life which will ever form in our galaxy. I'd strongly disagree with the notion of "we are only 14B years into a many-trillion-year stretch" - we're at or past the midpoint, half or more of all the possible potential-life-forming-events in our galaxy have already occurred.

GolfPopper 4y ago
>we're at or past the midpoint, half or more of all the possible potential-life-forming-events in our galaxy have already occurred Caveat: for life that resembles life on Earth. Admittedly that's the only kind of life we're certain exists, but more or less alien forms of life seem to be at least theoretically possible. (Which gets into whether we'd even recognize each other as life.)

3pt14159 4y ago

First one doesn't really make much sense. There are so many intelligent lifeforms on earth (whales, octopods, birds, monkeys, canines) and intelligent hive-minds (bees, ants, termites) that the leap to exponential tool use doesn't seem like something that would take anything close to 100B years, let alone trillions of years. As for number two, it's hard to comprehend a response that is reasonable because our cognition may be part of the "disturbing reasons" right? The theory I more and more think is probably right is that there is some major aspect of the universe that we get wrong. What is more likely, humans thinking they understand something when they don't or that no life form was able to spread amongst the stars in billions of years? I have plenty of lived examples of humans with false knowledge. It's a sort of meta Drake equation. [Likelihood humans are not as wise as they think they are]*[rest of drake equation] and I think the drake equation, as stated, correctly leads to the term "Paradox" given the conventional understanding of science as communicated by scientists.

funklute 4y ago
> First one doesn't really make much sense. There are so many intelligent lifeforms on earth ... that the leap to exponential tool use doesn't seem like something that would take anything close to 100B years, let alone trillions of years. I don't quite understand your logic here? The big barrier(s) doesn't seem to be tool use, but rather 1) the formation of life itself, and then 2) the move from single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms (this took 2 billion years on earth, so is clearly a very difficult step).
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  I'm sleepy from a bad night, but let me try to explain: > our existence now is so unlikely that it's possible that we actually are the first. Something has to be first. When the OP said that ^ I took we to mean humans with technology, presuming the OP meant that we were somehow special. Basically I took it as him saying that we're first because we're lucky so my argument was: > How are we lucky? Look at all the other intelligent lifeforms on Earth! Surely the lucky winners would have had some sort of fluke that made them one of the few with intelligent brains on their planet! This could have easily happened sooner on Earth! If the OP meant that life itself was extraordinarily rare on any given celestial object then that is something I don't consider especially groundbreaking since its part of the Fermi Paradox formula in its basic form the precise value of which has been debated for years and I do not find convincing.

hindsightbias 4y ago

Studies say we are 5 Gigayears late to the party. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07902 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07902

__alexs 4y ago

(2) is just theism with extra steps.

joshuahedlund 4y ago
I think you are on the right track. I would say it's more like "alien-of-the-gaps".

seer 4y ago

Obligatory XKCD, explaining resolution 2 with ants :) https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/

joshuahedlund 4y ago
The problem with the analogy is assuming that humans are the only living things for the ants to find! (An ironically human-centric error in an attempt to expose human-centric thinking) The analogy would be more accurate if the two ants had scanned everything in a one-mile radius and found zero other insects anywhere, which would be... a little curious...

wing-_-nuts 4y ago

I think 'we're first' is unlikely, but the universe is so unimaginably large that we could well be first in the little bubble we can readily observe. Alternatively, another civilization has come and gone, and we've yet to spot it's remnants. I don't buy the whole idea of 'we just can't see them'. We're very good at detecting signal from our physical world, and any advanced civilization is going to be noticeable as they start harvesting the power of nearby suns. Maybe you're right though, maybe 'dark matter' is the mass of other multiverses and gravity is the only force that bleeds through.

dividedbyzero 4y ago

3 There is big cost or downside to galaxy-wide expansion that we don't get and that limits expansion, like travelling interstellar distances being far harder than we imagine in practice. 4 We are weird in that we want to expand like this, but others don't, similar to how chimps appear to be well able to express themselves in sign language, but appear to simply lack any urge to do so. Similar to your #2. 5 There simply isn't a compelling reason to expand galaxy-wide by the time you can. Reproduction must be stabilized in some way if mortality is taken out of the equation, which will probably happen earlier, a sufficiently advanced understanding of cosmology and physics might conclude there isn't any danger that can't be managed or that spreading out over a few lightyears wouldn't guard against sufficiently well. Getting rid of evolutionarily helpful urges that become a burden in a post-evolution world might be a filter by itself, so this is similar to your #2 in that they're different in a way we can't easily conceive. 6 Once you can make any existence you want happen (by some kind of unimaginably advanced VR) and have tech keep everyone safe and alive indefinitely, the actual universe might start to seem underwhelming. Better to live out the millennia in a perfectly convincing hedonistic metaverse. I could see that happen to us, come to think of it.

jandrese 4y ago
> 3 There is big cost or downside to galaxy-wide expansion that we don't get and that limits expansion, like travelling interstellar distances being far harder than we imagine in practice. This is my thought. Without FTL travel you have to go the slow way. Probably much less than C thanks to the rocket equation. But in order to do this you need to build a spacecraft capable of surviving for centuries or longer with absolutely no outside support, not even solar power. But if you can build that you have effectively unlimited space in your own solar system. Why bothering to travel to a different solar system at that point? Maybe if you have used up literally all of the resources in your current solar system, but that's a multi-billion year process. So you might only need to make the trip once or twice in the current age of the universe. But even that seems less likely than just developing really good recycling systems. So the solution to the Fermi paradox is that by the time you have the tech to travel between solar systems there is no longer any need to do so.

marcosdumay 4y ago

Every time you see someone saying Earth is rare in some way, or that the Great Filter is behind us, or that life is plentiful, but far away (grabby aliens being one of those), those are all the same argument, and the exact same argument as your #1. It is still missing any justification for what is so rare about it. (Not that those arguments are any hard to make; instead the main question here is which of them is the correct one.) Your argument #2 (that's the exact same as the zoo hypothesis) needs an extremely good reason for no alien at all trying to kill us and take Earth. And we currently lack any good reason.

micromacrofoot 4y ago
Possibly a similar reason we don't kill all the ants to take the sand?
mmazing 4y ago
> "Your argument #2 (that's the exact same as the zoo hypothesis) needs an extremely good reason for no alien at all trying to kill us and take Earth. And we currently lack any good reason." Maybe life supporting planets are abundant and there's no reason to risk a conflict with us? We've certainly been detecting a lot of them anyhow. It could be equivalent to me going to Africa to fight a lion for its den instead of just renting an apartment.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  It doesn't matter how plentiful planets are; and it doesn't matter if planets are not the aliens favorite environment. Living beings tend to get at every single place, unless something really compelling is stopping them. (And we have a large history of killing lions to get their habitat. We do lot of that with ants too, and all kinds of insects like the sibling comment seems to ignore.)
aidenn0 4y ago
If the Great Filter is behind us, I like mitochondria as a candidate; from what we know of Earth, it took over a billion years to happen, appears to have happened just once, and all complex life has it.

lordnacho 4y ago

Any estimate of how soon life could appear after the big bang?

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captainmuon 4y ago

My favorite solution is very simple: We're overestimating our ability to detect extraterrestrial live. It might be common and look similar to us. They might even use radio signals. But until somebody demonstrates that you can detect stray telecommunications signals over lightyears I find it hard to believe. I also think it is going to be hard to detect the chemical signature of life e.g. via spectroscopy, if you can't even image the planet next to it's overshining star. Second, and somewhat sobering part: I also think it is practically impossible to do interstellar journeys. You can imagine scaling up existing tech to do so. But I think at some point the complexity and cost (in terms of resources, not money) would diverge. As an analogy, you can build a small robot, but if you try to scale it up to a mech it will not work in reality. Too heavy to move, yet to flimsy to stand.

mortenjorck 4y ago

My double-edged Occam's razor for extraterrestrial life: Due to the vast scale of the universe, the probability of other life existing rounds to 100%. Due to the vast scale of the universe, the probability of finding other life rounds to 0%.

dspillett 4y ago
Also due to the continuing expansion of the universe, that latter probability will get more infinitesimal for any given pocket of life as time goes on and more & more of what has happens in the universe “escapes” their light-cone.

feoren 4y ago

> 2 - Aliens are everywhere, but we cannot perceive them We can detect neutrinos with advanced instruments. We've never had an evolutionary reason to do that. There's really just no room for this explanation. Energy and mass are one and the same. If we can detect neutrinos, but not these intelligent aliens that are everywhere, it means that they don't occupy physical space, don't have mass (and therefore must move at C only), don't use energy, don't send signals to one another, don't accelerate or decelerate, aren't involved in chemical reactions, don't interact with any of the particles we do, don't perceive light, etc. etc. At that point, they basically don't exist in our universe. It's not enough to say "but ants don't know we exist!" -- first of all, yes they do. Secondly, you're really saying that intelligent ants who formed an advanced society, had a scientific revolution, and built instruments capable of determining the number of moons on Jupiter, still would not know we exist. That is clearly ludicrous. And this doesn't even solve the Fermi paradox! There's clearly plenty of "room" for aliens that are "somewhat similar" to us; that is, they actually are made of protons and neutrons, etc. Where are all those aliens?

saiya-jin 4y ago
So many incorrect statements and assumptions... our current footprint would be unrecognizable from few hundred light years to even a bit more advanced civilization looking straight at our Sun. So yes there very well may be aliens just like us technology wise say 200 or 2000 or 2000000 light years away and they nor we simply wouldn't know. We don't know what we don't know from physics, the arrogance of thinking we get it all was there numerous times and it was always a wrong emotion, we even realize it for our current theories. There may be quantum entanglement communication, higher dimensions, strings or basically anything your nor my mind can't even come up with right now. Just like cavemen simply couldn't come up with general relativity even if it was all happening right in front of their eyes.
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ASalazarMX 4y ago
Imagine if it turns out sentience can arise in stars, gas, dust, or minerals. Maybe they won't be advanced civilizations, more like animals we can't recognize as creatures even when they're in front of us. We might even start mining them, as eyelash mites mine us without comprehending us.

aaroninsf 4y ago

I also think some version of 2 is overwhelmingly likely. In particular, I have always found the core premises of SETI surveys profoundly naive in terms of necessary preconditions for it to be meaningful. "If your only tool is a giant radio telescope, you look for radio signals." And in specific you look in bands that fit various preconditions of your technology; and then you look for signals which are loosely comparable to the ones we humans used nearly a century ago. The folly of belief that such surveys are likely to uncover unobfuscated communications by some other civilization was truly driven home to me reading here on HN in the last year or two a deep dive into an iPhone exploit that relied on exploiting some issues with its discovery protocols for other devices in the phone's vicinity. The specifics of its multiplexing and frequency hopping and duty cycling across various tasks were hard enough to follow when the priors of the stack and hardware are all very well known. The only signal SETI is liable to see is the equivalent of someone blowing an air horn in a stadium explicitly to be heard. Maybe someone does that. Maybe they find the forest dark enough to not... The more interesting survey IMO is to look carefully for Dyson-sphere style dimming...

mFixman 4y ago

My favourite resolution is that "intelligence" is a concept created by humans that only humans and species evolutionarily close to humans have. It should be called "human intelligence". The Fermi paradox doesn't work because we have roughly the same chance of finding a human-intelligent alien as we have to find a Swedish-speaking alien. For all I know the planet Neptune is actually alive and intelligent in a way we cannot comprehend.

rendall 4y ago
> The Fermi paradox doesn't work because we have roughly the same chance of finding a human-intelligent alien as we have to find a Swedish-speaking alien. This is great.

cuteboy19 4y ago

1 is not true. You are actually experiencing dartboard paradox. The probability of the dart hitting one particular point is nearly zero. Yet some point has to be hit by the dart. In the same way, even though someone has to be the first, that does not change the probability of us being the first (which is very unlikely by most estimates of the probability distribution)

rendall 4y ago

I'm not convinced by refutations of #2 that point out that we humans have developed technologies that extend our senses, eg. we can now detect neutrinos, gravity waves, microwaves, what-have-you. While these are extensions of the senses we have, we still are evolved to understand an environment that is an infinitely narrow slice of all possible environments in the universe, and Earth life's approach is an infinitely narrow slice of all possible ways of perceiving and surviving an underlying reality that is vastly unknowable. As we look into a Universe (or even look around ourselves here on Earth) with our sense extenders, we are still bound by the limitations of our cognition and perception.