A possible answer to Fermi that I don't hear often: that there's plenty of life in the universe, but it's long-lived, and very, very slow. If you assume that i

A possible answer to Fermi that I don't hear often: that there's plenty of life in the universe, but it's long-lived, and very, very slow. If you assume that intelligence inevitably separates from its physical substrate into some form of persistent data, this is the logical way to get around the light-speed limit: you go dormant and simply wait the thousand years it takes to get a reply, or the hundred-thousand years it takes to arrive at a new solar system. Such intelligences would only interested in speaking to other "Space Ents" (anything else must seem like a fruit fly in comparison), and it's prohibitively expensive to saturate the galaxy with signal, so maybe you send targeted pings at promising worlds every few thousand years. Maybe that's the Wow! signal [1]. Or maybe we just haven't been around long enough to get our first hello. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal