6 ms·
I think the most convincing answer to Fermi is the dark forest theory. The reason no one speaks up is that there is good incentive not to - you get to survive a
by idiotsecant 4y ago
I think the most convincing answer to Fermi is the dark forest theory. The reason no one speaks up is that there is good incentive not to - you get to survive as a species if you stay small and quiet.
- jjallen 4y agoExcept we are already violating this by sending things out into interstellar space.
- coredog64 4y agoNot just “some things”: Nudes, a mix tape, and directions back to our house.
- catskul2 4y agoIf you haven't already, read "the 3-body problem".
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoYeah, seems to me there'd be a bit of time in there before any civilizations decided it was better to stay silent. But that time might not be astronomically relevant.
- idiotsecant 4y agoWe really haven't sent anything that's very 'loud' out into space though. A little probe without even an active transmission process is not a very loud signal. All of the electromagnetic noise we emit is barely perceptible above CMB once you get even a small distance away. On a galactic scale, we have been almost entirely silent so far.
- vecter 4y agoThe Dark Forest is a fun idea but sounds so clearly illogical to me for so many reasons: 1. The cost of interstellar travel is so obscenely high that the threat posed by the discovery of an alien species on their home planet would be so miniscule to us and them 2. The cost of remotely annihilating an entire species is so absurdly high as to be obviously impractical and basically impossible. [Spoiler alert] The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin renders all of this irrelevant by the use of science fiction: it purports the existence of interstellar world-destroying weapons that any lowly member of a species can casually "flick" at a "star plucker" to obliterate them. That is not how physics or reality works. We don't even send our trash to space because just getting it out of Earth's orbit is so ridiculously expensive, yet we're thinking about sending enough explosives to destroy an entire civilization some 100+ light-years away?
- ericb 4y agoWe've already been sent the world destroying bomb. It is an information bomb built on tragedy of the commons to ensure we overheat our planet before we become interplanetary. Its name is Bitcoin.
- sophacles 4y agoInteresting that you assume physics and engineering are "done" and that there are no unknowns, and that there are no new inventions that will happen moving forward. I don't know any physicists or engineers who believe any such thing. 500 years ago your argument would have been: We cant even get to china in 12 weeks without considerable danger and expense, and you expect me to believe its routine for peasants to do so in 12 hours? That anyone can make a near perfect painting and send it to anyone else no matter where they are in a heartbeat - we don't even make bad paintings of anyone who isn't extremely rich because of the absurd expense of it.
- vecter 4y agoI did not assume that "physics and engineering are 'done'". I assume instead that the known laws of physics which seem to prevent faster-than-light travel hold and are inviolable, despite how smart any species may be. The analogy with the the argument 500 years ago doesn't apply because 500 years ago we did not have the understanding of physics and chemistry that we have today. Of course we still have a lot of physics left to discover, but it's extremely unlikely that whatever new physics we discover will violate special relativity.
- pklausler 4y agoThe most convincing answer to Fermi's paradox is that since the galaxy is not saturated with Bracewell - von Neumann self-replicating slow interstellar probes, no civilization has yet launched one, and thus there has not yet been a civilization in our galaxy capable of launching one. The launch of a working BvN probe is basically a permanent phase change for a galaxy.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoWhat would you expect a BvN probe to do that would make it detectable in distant star systems, or even in our own (mostly unexplored) system?