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Concerning your question, you're probably familiar with these arguments, but here goes. Assuming it's true, the main conclusion from Fermi's paradox (which is
by swombat 14y ago
Concerning your question, you're probably familiar with these arguments, but here goes.
Assuming it's true, the main conclusion from Fermi's paradox (which is really an observation more than a Paradox) is that there is some kind of "cliff" that vastly reduces the number of civilisations that achieve the technology required to come visit us with their robot suits.
The interesting question is, where is this cliff: before where we are now, or after?
If it is before, then that's great for us. What it means is, for example, that perhaps the evolution of life, or multi-cellular life, or animal life, or intelligent life, etc - is so unlikely that even though there are trillions of trillions of attempts, those that succeed are so far apart that they will never meet (perhaps thanks to the expansion of the universe, or through the difficulty of travelling across interstellar distances, etc). That's the lucky scenario.
The unlucky scenario is that this cliff is after where we are now. Perhaps there are millions of intelligent species even in just the Milky Way, but perhaps intelligent life is doomed to self-destroy eventually (for example by reaching a Singularity, building a Dyson sphere, and then basically disappearing up its own arse; or perhaps by ending in some kind of nuclear war, or biological wipeout after someone's biology experiment goes horribly wrong, etc).
That latter scenario would mean that we're likely to kill ourselves before we get to the stars.
I hope for the first scenario.
Edit: Of course, as pixl97 points out, perhaps Fermi's paradox is an incorrect observation, and the aliens are already here, they're just being really cautious about being observed.
- bluedanieru 14y agoIs there any reason to think, that if there were many alien civilizations in our galaxy capable capable of radio transmission, that we would be have picked up on the signal? The last I checked (and I admit it has been a few years), the folks at SETI have basically said that even if the Milky Way galaxy was rife with technologically advanced civilizations the chance that we would have observed one is very small, given current efforts to date. I've read a paper which pretty much lays out exactly the argument you describe, and the whole time I couldn't help but think the author was ignoring the very obvious. We can't even be sure that advanced civilizations would use radio that much, if at all, and even if they did, it's not as though we've conducted such a thorough search that we can confidently say "nope, no radios here". Not even close, in fact.
- sampo 14y ago"perhaps the evolution of life, or multi-cellular life, or animal life, or intelligent life, etc - is so unlikely ..." Bacterial life appeared on Earth pretty much as soon as the planet had cooled down. An argument could be that some extremely unlikely chemical coincidence was needed to create life, but I think the observation gives more support for the theory that if you have a planet with prebiotic soup, the biotic part is going to kick in pretty soon. But then it took 4 billion years -- or 30% of the whole universe's lifetime -- for life to invent multicellularity (with some important steps, like the invention of nucleus and thus eukaryotic cells, still unicellular life, half-way in between). I don't have a problem believing that bacterial life is abundant in the universe. But life on Earth, inventing multicellularity only in 4 billion years, and then sentience only in 0.6 billion more (multicellularity obviously being the harder part), is among the fast ones. Wait another 4 billion years to give the slower ones a fair chance to discover multicellularity, too.