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The Fermi paradox is completely overhyped, especially if it really originated from a lunch discussion with Fermi, as Wikipedia claims. It's a random thought, no

The Fermi paradox is completely overhyped, especially if it really originated from a lunch discussion with Fermi, as Wikipedia claims. It's a random thought, not some deep question about the universe. The paradox supposedly reads: If life is ubiquitous, then why don't we see it? But there is nothing to solve. The first conclusion should be that the assumption is simply false. We have no proof that life ubiquitous, so why hold on to it so dearly? But even if we do, there are plenty of reasonable and plausible explanations as to why we don't see alien life. Just read the other comments. In fact, there are so many possible explanations that the challenge becomes: which one is the correct one? However, a paradox this is not.

soared 4y ago
To your first point, assuming alien life is not ubiquitous would be an equally thought provoking claim. The Fermi paradox asks “are we alone?” while yours claims “we are alone.”
PeterisP 4y ago
The paradox is that if we make seemingly reasonable assumptions/estimates about all the factors required for advanced aliens to occur, there should be many such civilizations - and if we observe that there aren't any, then it implies that some of these assumptions are very, very wrong. However, since the initial Fermi discussion we have gathered some more evidence about the universe and these assumptions/estimates still seem reasonable, in some cases (e.g. the number of exoplanets) even larger than originally. So there is a contradiction, or paradox about that.
- q1w2 4y ago
  The unreasonable assumption is that aliens with hundreds of millions of years of additional development, would "colonize" planets like organic creatures and fly around like Star Trek. It's entirely unreasonable to assume that we would be able to see aliens at all nor that they'd have any interest in US.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  The paradox assumes "advanced aliens" having abilities we've never observed and which are impossible given current human technologies. These aliens have been imagined by essentially linearly extrapolating human technological progress and, European expansion across the Earth. Humans have explored the solar system and it's becoming clear to most people that off-earth settlements are unlikely to in the foreseeable future (despite certain people's claims). Colonizing near-space, if it happens, won't be like colonizing earth. Moreover, our current exponential increase in resource usage seems more like to destroy our species than to get us to space - if we fix that, the perceived need to get to get to space may much less once technology reaches the point it would allow us to do so. Basically asking "why can't we see the interstellar empires?". Well, maybe these don't exist even if many earth-like societies exist. Maybe "colonizing" other stars is uninteresting to any society that reach level where it would be possible. Maybe there really are hard limits to such endeavors or maybe we're alone at the moment (the limited time in the universe is a factor. Life on earth took a significant fraction of the universe' lifetime to develop and the earlier universe might have been life hostile).
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    I disagree that this requires "advanced aliens" having abilities we've never observed. Let's assume that a fictional alien race has the technology level we have right now and no significant advances happen after that, just the buildup of the infrastructure that we could build today but haven't yet built because we just invented it a few years ago. With this level of technology it seems entirely plausible that a planet will spare the resources to prepare a single 'generation ship' once every 1000 or 10000 years - like, if once every hundred generations a crazy billionaire decides to spend their wealth on this, it should be in the ballpark of what's possible; it doesn't require a consistent effort of the whole civilization, sporadic one-off actions every few millenia are enough. And within 10k-100k years of settlement, that planet definitely can gain the same capability. And that's enough - with this stagnant level of tech, and with this conservative rate of expansion, that alien race would still be expected to populate the whole galaxy long before the first hominids appeared on Earth. Of course, the species destroying itself is a valid argument - that's why this chance is an explicit factor in the Fermi Paradox.
- mr_mitm 4y ago
  > seemingly reasonable assumptions/estimate I challenge the idea that all the assumptions hidden in the claim that life is ubiquitous are seemingly reasonable. For instance, we don't have the faintest idea of how likely it is that eukaryotic life evolves from prokaryotes or if prokaryotes can themselves become complex life forms. Next, we don't know the likelihood of complex life becoming intelligent. It's not like this is some natural goal of evolution, at least as far as we know. It may have been an extremely rare accident here on earth. There are many more such assumptions, some of which Fermi could not have known about. But we shouldn't ignore all the progress we have made since then.
- MrScruff 4y ago
  I really don't see how we estimate f_l in Drake's equation? Other than knowing it's >0 I mean.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
All science is accomplished by doing the exact opposite of the scientific method, which you’re essentially appealing to here. The scientific method isn’t how science is created, it’s how it’s finalized. In some way the scientific method part is the most important but least interesting part of proving a theory. Having a theory doesn’t mean the theory is wrong, it just means you can’t yet prove it is wrong. Any good theory has a very strong intuition to back it, otherwise why investigate it with the scientific method? A good theory should have some basis that’s logically convincing. You can definitely hype your theory while you prove it. That’s how you get other scientists to know of your theory and collaborate. A lot of scientific papers are doing exactly that - peddling an unproven theory by providing a proven step towards that ultimate theory. My feeling is the “life must exist” theory is probably right. The problem for proving will be materially improving the ability to move mass and information in sufficient quantities and at sufficient rates to have any chance of proving anything one way or the other. But in order to prove the theory you need only one instance if it exists and we can make reasoned guesses about life we understand to see if there’s life like us as an optimization. That seems like a good advantage for proving life exists. The disproof of life in the universe is even harder - you essentially need to comb everywhere and everything for patterns that aren’t explained by the local environment to disprove. I think it’s unlikely the theory will be disproven. The longer we go without positive proof though the more likely we can not prove it but can assume life doesn’t exist outside this planet. But we haven’t gone very far for very long in the scale of human history, and given the acceleration of advancement over the last 500 years I don’t think it’s fair to say we’ve explored the space of the problem sufficient to assume life doesn’t exist. And if it does exist, they likely have laser sharks and antimatter bombs. That’s why the Fermi paradox is so hyped.

soared 4y ago

To your first point, assuming alien life is not ubiquitous would be an equally thought provoking claim. The Fermi paradox asks “are we alone?” while yours claims “we are alone.”

PeterisP 4y ago

The paradox is that if we make seemingly reasonable assumptions/estimates about all the factors required for advanced aliens to occur, there should be many such civilizations - and if we observe that there aren't any, then it implies that some of these assumptions are very, very wrong. However, since the initial Fermi discussion we have gathered some more evidence about the universe and these assumptions/estimates still seem reasonable, in some cases (e.g. the number of exoplanets) even larger than originally. So there is a contradiction, or paradox about that.

q1w2 4y ago
The unreasonable assumption is that aliens with hundreds of millions of years of additional development, would "colonize" planets like organic creatures and fly around like Star Trek. It's entirely unreasonable to assume that we would be able to see aliens at all nor that they'd have any interest in US.
joe_the_user 4y ago
The paradox assumes "advanced aliens" having abilities we've never observed and which are impossible given current human technologies. These aliens have been imagined by essentially linearly extrapolating human technological progress and, European expansion across the Earth. Humans have explored the solar system and it's becoming clear to most people that off-earth settlements are unlikely to in the foreseeable future (despite certain people's claims). Colonizing near-space, if it happens, won't be like colonizing earth. Moreover, our current exponential increase in resource usage seems more like to destroy our species than to get us to space - if we fix that, the perceived need to get to get to space may much less once technology reaches the point it would allow us to do so. Basically asking "why can't we see the interstellar empires?". Well, maybe these don't exist even if many earth-like societies exist. Maybe "colonizing" other stars is uninteresting to any society that reach level where it would be possible. Maybe there really are hard limits to such endeavors or maybe we're alone at the moment (the limited time in the universe is a factor. Life on earth took a significant fraction of the universe' lifetime to develop and the earlier universe might have been life hostile).
- PeterisP 4y ago
  I disagree that this requires "advanced aliens" having abilities we've never observed. Let's assume that a fictional alien race has the technology level we have right now and no significant advances happen after that, just the buildup of the infrastructure that we could build today but haven't yet built because we just invented it a few years ago. With this level of technology it seems entirely plausible that a planet will spare the resources to prepare a single 'generation ship' once every 1000 or 10000 years - like, if once every hundred generations a crazy billionaire decides to spend their wealth on this, it should be in the ballpark of what's possible; it doesn't require a consistent effort of the whole civilization, sporadic one-off actions every few millenia are enough. And within 10k-100k years of settlement, that planet definitely can gain the same capability. And that's enough - with this stagnant level of tech, and with this conservative rate of expansion, that alien race would still be expected to populate the whole galaxy long before the first hominids appeared on Earth. Of course, the species destroying itself is a valid argument - that's why this chance is an explicit factor in the Fermi Paradox.
mr_mitm 4y ago
> seemingly reasonable assumptions/estimate I challenge the idea that all the assumptions hidden in the claim that life is ubiquitous are seemingly reasonable. For instance, we don't have the faintest idea of how likely it is that eukaryotic life evolves from prokaryotes or if prokaryotes can themselves become complex life forms. Next, we don't know the likelihood of complex life becoming intelligent. It's not like this is some natural goal of evolution, at least as far as we know. It may have been an extremely rare accident here on earth. There are many more such assumptions, some of which Fermi could not have known about. But we shouldn't ignore all the progress we have made since then.
MrScruff 4y ago
I really don't see how we estimate f_l in Drake's equation? Other than knowing it's >0 I mean.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

All science is accomplished by doing the exact opposite of the scientific method, which you’re essentially appealing to here. The scientific method isn’t how science is created, it’s how it’s finalized. In some way the scientific method part is the most important but least interesting part of proving a theory. Having a theory doesn’t mean the theory is wrong, it just means you can’t yet prove it is wrong. Any good theory has a very strong intuition to back it, otherwise why investigate it with the scientific method? A good theory should have some basis that’s logically convincing. You can definitely hype your theory while you prove it. That’s how you get other scientists to know of your theory and collaborate. A lot of scientific papers are doing exactly that - peddling an unproven theory by providing a proven step towards that ultimate theory. My feeling is the “life must exist” theory is probably right. The problem for proving will be materially improving the ability to move mass and information in sufficient quantities and at sufficient rates to have any chance of proving anything one way or the other. But in order to prove the theory you need only one instance if it exists and we can make reasoned guesses about life we understand to see if there’s life like us as an optimization. That seems like a good advantage for proving life exists. The disproof of life in the universe is even harder - you essentially need to comb everywhere and everything for patterns that aren’t explained by the local environment to disprove. I think it’s unlikely the theory will be disproven. The longer we go without positive proof though the more likely we can not prove it but can assume life doesn’t exist outside this planet. But we haven’t gone very far for very long in the scale of human history, and given the acceleration of advancement over the last 500 years I don’t think it’s fair to say we’ve explored the space of the problem sufficient to assume life doesn’t exist. And if it does exist, they likely have laser sharks and antimatter bombs. That’s why the Fermi paradox is so hyped.