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Everything you touch on is part of one or more potential answers to the Fermi paradox that have been proposed. And they're good points! One or all of them might

Everything you touch on is part of one or more potential answers to the Fermi paradox that have been proposed. And they're good points! One or all of them might be the answer. > My point is - it's not a paradox unless you make some pretty wild assumptions that have no basis for them in the first place (i.e. no priors to inform probabilities or search criteria). I think this is where there's a lot of talking past each other. All we have is our current understanding of things, and the paradox is simply going "Huh. Based on what we know, seems like there should be other intelligent life out there we'd have evidence of. Weird that isn't not there, right?" It's not really a matter of making wild assumptions, just going off of the evidence we have at current. Fermi asked the question while eating lunch - it wasn't a theory he wrote. It's not based on a body of theory and work specific to it. There's not some huge amount of scientific rigor behind it stating intelligent aliens aren't out there. It's just a question of why haven't we seen it. Most research on this subject is a byproduct of other research. There are very few scientists that would say their primary research is SETI - dozens to a hundred or so? And even some of the largest and best funded projects in this field like Breakthrough Listen generally don't have scientists working exclusively on it - it might be a significant portion of their time, but for most it is not their exclusive focus.

vlovich123 2y ago
> All we have is our current understanding of things, and the paradox is simply going Actually based on what I’ve learned about it, the paradox is actually doing both things: it’s assuming over enough time scale our technology evolves rapidly enough to unlock new physics to traverse the universe we don’t have today while simultaneously being able to detect it using insanely primitive technology by comparison. It would be like asking someone to detect an atomic explosion in our solar system in 1930 - an explosion we’d likely not even notice today I suspect. There’s simply not enough understanding, we’re monitoring too little of the universe, and the equipment to do the monitoring is too primitive if technology really continues to advance at the pace posed by the Fermi paradox. Basically the Fermi paradox says “after the invention of modern science and Industrial Revolution, within a couple of hundred of years we were flying, within 50 years we’d left orbit and within 20 years or so we’d reached a moon. So surely after a few hundred thousand years the society should be able to reach and have colonized huge swaths of the galaxy”. But that kind of advancement would be at odds with our ability to detect such signatures and what we’re doing today is hypothesizing crazy sci-fi ideas and looking for those signatures with insanely primitive tools that have poor resolution. Communication we have 0 chance of spotting (encryption + energy efficiency = noise). Dyson spheres are interesting to look for but it’ll be a while before some novel ideas for how to spot them pan out (and that’s assuming the clever ideas are correct about what the footprint would look like and that Dyson spheres would be needed for long distance travel vs wormholes). However based on our current understanding of technology long distance travel is simply not possible - the Milky Way itself is 100k light years across. Even at 10% light speed that’s 1 million years to traverse the galaxy and ignores the challenges (surfing that kind of distance traveling at such speeds and avoiding all kinds of things flying through space). And visiting (let alone building major hubs) various star systems is going to take significantly more than that. If you can only manage 1% then that’s a 10 million year undertaking just to go from one end to another. It’s easy to imagine that visiting many star systems would take billions of years and that’s with technology we don’t know we can even build. And ignoring the practical challenges of going that fast, needing to survive, decelerating, and ignoring the economics of creating a craft that can undertake and last a 100k year journey at relativistic speeds. And saying we don’t have scientists working on this actually proves my point that there’s no paradox - no one is really working on this problem using very poor sensors trying to think as creatively as they can with basically 0 knowledge (compared to a civilization many thousands of years older than us) for signals we don’t know how or where to look for. So of course we haven’t found anything.
- kulahan 2y ago
  Your entire post here is making a lot of incorrect assumptions about the paradox. As the other guy said, it's not some rigorous thing, but you're definitely not the first guy to think "Well... what if FTL travel isn't possible?" or "What if every single technological species in the entire universe all decided to hide their messages since their inception somehow?". A million years in a cosmological timescale is nothing. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and we only came in right at the end. If we'd come in 200 Million years earlier, we'd have covered many, many galaxies by now - we could expand in all directions pretty much simultaneously. This doesn't even begin to get into your assumption that every species in the universe would even WANT to hide - the concept of "territory" isn't exactly foreign to us. We don't need to prove that there IS a species acting this way to solve the paradox, we need to explain why NO species is doing this, or if they are, why NONE are putting up markers in a manner that's easy for everyone to see?
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    I never said it's a rigorous thing; I'm highlighting that there's too many flaws to take seriously (i.e. evidence of absence in this case tells us nothing). Remember - it's a million to do a straight shot across the universe at quite a large portion of the speed of light. In terms of colonization we're talking billions of years for an unknown fraction of the galaxy, but definitely not the entire thing. And much of the galaxy may not even be suited for colonization (e.g. presumably you still need some raw resources & have to be careful about where you go to to expand) As for "hiding" I never said they want to hide. But you only need to look at the modern world to realize that digital communication and encryption are standard fare and "hiding" is a natural evolution of that. And the longer distances you are transmitting and the more signals you need to monitor, the more energy efficient you want to be (i.e. point to point + relays instead of broadspectrum broadcasts). And if advanced civilizations use neutrino comms or quantum entaglement somehow, then they'd naturally be hidden just because that's how more advanced tech would work. As for territory, I never said they wouldn't be territorial. But a lion isn't going to bother being territorial with a mouse. No reason to believe they're going to try to broadcast ownership in a way that a "stone age" species like ours could detect. Additionally, it's not impossible that communication barriers are real and therefore there's not really much to communicate out vs "show up in our heavily fortified star system & see disappear" kind of behavior. The counter argument is that you may actually want to hide unless you're the apex civilization because otherwise the apex civilization may choose to conquer and murder yours (e.g. Europeans vs Native Americans) to prevent competition. My point is that there's so many reasons that we're not finding anything (nonexistent priors, searching in the wrong spot, search for the wrong signals, not having enough people searching, having the wrong equipment, not even having the physics required to start searching, etc etc) that the Fermi paradox provides no insight & can't even be called a paradox yet. If faster than light travel is possible, this changes a lot of calculus of course. But similarly, is there any reason to believe our solar system would be interesting enough for the species to come to us? Or maybe there's even political things like Star Trek's first contact rule that put us in a bubble & intentionally mask the existence of the aliens in the first place.

vlovich123 2y ago

> All we have is our current understanding of things, and the paradox is simply going Actually based on what I’ve learned about it, the paradox is actually doing both things: it’s assuming over enough time scale our technology evolves rapidly enough to unlock new physics to traverse the universe we don’t have today while simultaneously being able to detect it using insanely primitive technology by comparison. It would be like asking someone to detect an atomic explosion in our solar system in 1930 - an explosion we’d likely not even notice today I suspect. There’s simply not enough understanding, we’re monitoring too little of the universe, and the equipment to do the monitoring is too primitive if technology really continues to advance at the pace posed by the Fermi paradox. Basically the Fermi paradox says “after the invention of modern science and Industrial Revolution, within a couple of hundred of years we were flying, within 50 years we’d left orbit and within 20 years or so we’d reached a moon. So surely after a few hundred thousand years the society should be able to reach and have colonized huge swaths of the galaxy”. But that kind of advancement would be at odds with our ability to detect such signatures and what we’re doing today is hypothesizing crazy sci-fi ideas and looking for those signatures with insanely primitive tools that have poor resolution. Communication we have 0 chance of spotting (encryption + energy efficiency = noise). Dyson spheres are interesting to look for but it’ll be a while before some novel ideas for how to spot them pan out (and that’s assuming the clever ideas are correct about what the footprint would look like and that Dyson spheres would be needed for long distance travel vs wormholes). However based on our current understanding of technology long distance travel is simply not possible - the Milky Way itself is 100k light years across. Even at 10% light speed that’s 1 million years to traverse the galaxy and ignores the challenges (surfing that kind of distance traveling at such speeds and avoiding all kinds of things flying through space). And visiting (let alone building major hubs) various star systems is going to take significantly more than that. If you can only manage 1% then that’s a 10 million year undertaking just to go from one end to another. It’s easy to imagine that visiting many star systems would take billions of years and that’s with technology we don’t know we can even build. And ignoring the practical challenges of going that fast, needing to survive, decelerating, and ignoring the economics of creating a craft that can undertake and last a 100k year journey at relativistic speeds. And saying we don’t have scientists working on this actually proves my point that there’s no paradox - no one is really working on this problem using very poor sensors trying to think as creatively as they can with basically 0 knowledge (compared to a civilization many thousands of years older than us) for signals we don’t know how or where to look for. So of course we haven’t found anything.

kulahan 2y ago
Your entire post here is making a lot of incorrect assumptions about the paradox. As the other guy said, it's not some rigorous thing, but you're definitely not the first guy to think "Well... what if FTL travel isn't possible?" or "What if every single technological species in the entire universe all decided to hide their messages since their inception somehow?". A million years in a cosmological timescale is nothing. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and we only came in right at the end. If we'd come in 200 Million years earlier, we'd have covered many, many galaxies by now - we could expand in all directions pretty much simultaneously. This doesn't even begin to get into your assumption that every species in the universe would even WANT to hide - the concept of "territory" isn't exactly foreign to us. We don't need to prove that there IS a species acting this way to solve the paradox, we need to explain why NO species is doing this, or if they are, why NONE are putting up markers in a manner that's easy for everyone to see?
- vlovich123 2y ago
  I never said it's a rigorous thing; I'm highlighting that there's too many flaws to take seriously (i.e. evidence of absence in this case tells us nothing). Remember - it's a million to do a straight shot across the universe at quite a large portion of the speed of light. In terms of colonization we're talking billions of years for an unknown fraction of the galaxy, but definitely not the entire thing. And much of the galaxy may not even be suited for colonization (e.g. presumably you still need some raw resources & have to be careful about where you go to to expand) As for "hiding" I never said they want to hide. But you only need to look at the modern world to realize that digital communication and encryption are standard fare and "hiding" is a natural evolution of that. And the longer distances you are transmitting and the more signals you need to monitor, the more energy efficient you want to be (i.e. point to point + relays instead of broadspectrum broadcasts). And if advanced civilizations use neutrino comms or quantum entaglement somehow, then they'd naturally be hidden just because that's how more advanced tech would work. As for territory, I never said they wouldn't be territorial. But a lion isn't going to bother being territorial with a mouse. No reason to believe they're going to try to broadcast ownership in a way that a "stone age" species like ours could detect. Additionally, it's not impossible that communication barriers are real and therefore there's not really much to communicate out vs "show up in our heavily fortified star system & see disappear" kind of behavior. The counter argument is that you may actually want to hide unless you're the apex civilization because otherwise the apex civilization may choose to conquer and murder yours (e.g. Europeans vs Native Americans) to prevent competition. My point is that there's so many reasons that we're not finding anything (nonexistent priors, searching in the wrong spot, search for the wrong signals, not having enough people searching, having the wrong equipment, not even having the physics required to start searching, etc etc) that the Fermi paradox provides no insight & can't even be called a paradox yet. If faster than light travel is possible, this changes a lot of calculus of course. But similarly, is there any reason to believe our solar system would be interesting enough for the species to come to us? Or maybe there's even political things like Star Trek's first contact rule that put us in a bubble & intentionally mask the existence of the aliens in the first place.