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The assumption that colonisation and endless population growth are inevitable goals of any intelligence is a flaw of the paradox, in my opinion. I see it as som

The assumption that colonisation and endless population growth are inevitable goals of any intelligence is a flaw of the paradox, in my opinion. I see it as something we just haven’t outgrown yet as a species. That colonisation could of course be in the form of probes simply exploring, but there are timescale and resource issues with that which make me question if it would be worthwhile for a civilisation considering the limited energy in any given system and tremendous effort involved in getting to another once it runs out.

sqeaky 2y ago
It isn't an assumption. Not every civilization needs to expand but the ones that do will expand more than the ones that don't. And the expansionist subset of any civilization will wind up representing the whole of that Civilization on the larger scale. Any proposed great filter to the Fermi paradox needs to be non-exclusive. As in it can't be something that will only impact some of the group, it needs to impact all or very near to all in a statistically significant way. In the previous example if even just 1% of civilizations wind up having just a subset that go out and explore we would still expect to be able to have seen some here in the Milky Way because that would be 100,000 or so planets or Stars producing multicellular life and with the presumed odds we were discussing civilizations that expand. We presumed for the ease of math, because we're not pulling out the whole Drake equation, that the one in 1000 was just for the one filter. Of course you can do the math with whatever percentages you like at any filter. And each set of numbers you plug in means something slightly different with regards to what we're seeing and why we're seeing it out here in the real world.