What is your personal explanation for the fermi paradox?

It's size, it's always been size. A flake of snow in Antarctica has a near infinite better chance of encountering a grain of sand in the Gobi desert than we do of encountering another species.

Space is vast and they don't know we exist. We're living in the middle of a vast desert, if they exist they assume nothing can live in our region of the galaxy.

It takes a long time to get anywhere, and there's no reason to go anywhere when you can upload yourself, and if you upload yourself you don't want anyone coming to raid your shit irl while you party in your pleasure matrix

This, humanity's future isn't in going far away, it's in making sure the far away doesn't come here...

humanity isn't meant to colonized the stars. We're meant to give birth to sentient AI. Who will colonized the stars. We're just shepherds.

This doesn't resolve the paradox. Why haven't we been colonized?

I think the real reason is natural decadence.
Any conscious being must have come from evolution, like us. Once sufficient intelligence has been reached, civilisations arise. This halts evolution. Over thousands of years, inbreeding and in general the lack of natural selection leads to lesser intelligence. This in turn leads to collapse of civilisations.
There may also be a social/cultural aspect - once sufficient comfort has been reached , perhaps extraterrestrials, like ourselves, lose the will to explore and care only for the more bodily pleasures.
TL;DR civilisations don't survive long enough to develop any form of manned interstellar travel

>What is your personal explanation for the fermi paradox?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#They_are_here_undetected

>This halts evolution.
Nah. Adaptation to our environment still happens, it's just that we have /some/ control over our environment. We're definitely punctuating an equilibrium here, iykwim.

The great filter is efficiency.

Essentially, in order to become a space faring species before you consume your planet's resources or doom its biosphere, you need to abandon all infinite growth models. Meaning you have a handle on both your population and the resources which it uses.

The end result is that any species that does manage to leave its cradle, isn't going to leave much of a footprint in their galaxy. Without infinite growth, they are only motivated to colonize maybe one or two other systems, before colonizing more provides no further advantage in ensuring the survival of their species. From this point, the only way to further ensure their survival is to colonize another galaxy.

This means no need for mega-structures, no colonizing every planet in the galaxy, no environmental changes notable at astrological distances, and probably entails biological immortality.

Any species that continues to hold onto plans for infinite growth, and thus need to colonize the entire galaxy to survive, would likely never reach the stars. So this filter serves as a natural barrier, preventing any one species from dominating the galaxy to such an extent that no other species can arise.

(As additional motivation to minimize detection, any species capable of space travel probably realizes being found by another one so capable, might be a bad thing.)

There is no statistics about this matter, but I assume, since death is not a factor, and that sexual preference seems to be a trend now a days, that evolution is extremely slow if any, and that it is heavily outweighed by aforementioned degeneracy

Ant breed faster and are more adaptable than humans. By your logic we should have died out as a result of that. We didn't. We killed off the other hominids.

Civilization increases evolution exponentially - it's just that, instead of passing down information haphazardly from generation to generation through genes - you are instead purposely cataloging that information for future generations to learn from.

Information based evolution is a hell of a lot faster and more efficient than genetic evolution, and it in turn increases its own efficiency and speed, as information transfer methods improve over time.

...but then, of course, there's the great filter of the Youtube comments section.

Plus, eventually, you get a handle on genetic engineering and crispy-chan, and get to say, "Fuck you evolution, we do what we want!"

But yeah, that Youtube comment section is a problem.

First, space is ... well space, there's really no way to convey just how massive it is. There could be billions of alien civilizations, but that they're on the other side of the Galaxy, or even just a couple of light years away, but it's just impractical to get here. People being up that we should have heard their transmissions, but I think it seems pretty reasonable to assume either we can't distinguish them from General noise or, they communicate over long distances in a way we haven't thought of, and don't understand.

There could also be like some South Park like deal where intelligent species are left alone until they've reached a certain technological level

I can also imagine some species might just not be all that interested in exploring space. They might reach a point where they just create increasingly complex simulations or just focus on math and science.

I think of these 1 and 3 make the most sense to me

my personal explanation for the fermi paradox is that they are here

No, hominids were very capable of high movement, the population never separated. I just pulled that out of my ass.

Because this "paradox" is fucking stupid, interstellar travel is retarded, and the chance of a life, with complex life that develops anything resembling human civilization being within the current time frame and close enough to us retardedly low, you retard.

So? Do you the average person actually understands how anything fucking works? Modern humans are retarded and lazy, we wouldn't even be able to figure out how to get food without a fucking walmart for us to scooter over to.

Takes several billion ants to use up the resources of a single hominid.

We certainly killed some hominids, may be wiped out a few species, and probably just interbred with those closest to us. In cases of interbreeding, the more successful species with the highest population merely absorbs the one with less, which is what happens to most interbreeding subspecies when isolation fails to preserve them. The descendants of the remaining primates are being wiped out as we encroach on their habitat and change their environs.

>

Nearly every human understands how *something* works - usually several somethings. Employment is through specialization these days, so nearly everyone knows detailed minutia about something else you don't. Collectively, we know how everything works (er, well, near everything we make and do at least).

The individual human isn't any smarter than the human from 100,000 years ago, but we have a vast collection of knowledge like no other generation, and no other species, before us, to organize and build upon, and that gigantic pile is going nowhere but up, as a great number of specializations are focused on adding to it, preserving it, and deciminating it as needed.

Plus, eventually we'll start either integrating with it bio-electronically, genetically engineering ourselves to make ourselves capable of holding more of it, and doing said jobs better... Or we'll invent ASI, and it'll just take over for us from there.

My explanation is that its not a paradox. We have no idea of the statistical likelyhood of life and the drake equation cannot be assumed to be accurate if evidence doesn't show it to be.

Yeah, people know that there boss wants this bolt screwed in here, they know fuck all about how the whole works.

their*

Do people even know how big the universe is?

a sphere with a diameter of 96 billion light years = observable universe

now multiply that by 10^23 and you have the entire universe

Was Fermi part of the cover-up like Sagan

She looks really cute!

Biological immortality exists among several species on this planet, and it is within the realm of theoretical possibility even for us, a species that doesn't already have it, to genetically engineer it. Then the time involved with interstellar travel isn't a problem, as you can do it sublight - just a matter of getting enough tech to get build self-sustaining colony ship in orbit. More so if they switch to a non-biological makeup. (Nevermind that we came up with the model of relativity less than a hundred years ago, so we really don't know squat about the possibilities of FTL. Science is in its infancy and all.)

And that's where the Fermi paradox comes in, as, even if complex life is fairly rare, there's been enough viable time for several species to have evolved and colonized the entire galaxy, even under those non-FTL circumstances.

But it isn't taking into account the whys and hows involved in doing that. It's entirely likely that a species bent on eternal and exponential growth, that would thus have a motivation to colonize the entire galaxy, would end up destroying itself on its own world before it could ever attempt to do so. A species with no such motivation is much more apt to succeed past the self destruction point and be exceedingly efficient, but such a species would never need to colonize more than a handful of planets, and would likely remain almost entirely undetectable from any significant stellar distance, regardless of how advanced its technology is.

Then again, maybe complex life is just rare is fuck, or scared as fuck (perhaps for good reason).

and we only have a single point in that that we can say for sure has life.

Thus we can't infer anything from a statistical viewpoint.

Yeah, you try getting a job when all you know how to do is screw in bolts.

I mean, yes, there are your eternal Mickey-D and hard labor workers, but the majority of people in the civilized world are trained in specific fields with in-depth knowledge of each that would take literally years to decimate to you. The pile of knowledge we've collected to draw upon, in less than 1% of the time the species has been around, is absolutely mind boggling. Which is why we have specialists in every field to begin with, it's such a huge pile that each individual can only specialize in the tiniest part of it. And a great deal of that that ever-increasing pool of knowledge has gone to compounding that effect ad infinitum.

I was trying to make a CRISPR joke, but I think I failed.

This is such a high school answer. The universe is billions of years old, if a civilization started a billion years ago even a slow ass rocket ship would have crossed the galaxy by now. We are only what? 100,000 years old and already we're making plans to go to another star. That star gets colonized and they visit another star and keep hopping over generations until the entire milky way is colonized.

It is statistically incredibly unlikely that we're the only ones so there are only two solutions a) civilizations self destruct before ever managing to colonize the galaxy or b) they did and we are them (directed panspermia)

>It is statistically incredibly unlikely that we're the only ones so there are only two solutions a) civilizations self destruct before ever managing to colonize the galaxy or b) they did and we are them (directed panspermia)
Or c) we're the first, at least within our local cluster of galaxies, or possibly even our light cone.

Kinda of ignoring several dozen other possibilities though - most of which don't bode well for us.

The theory is so speculative as to be nearly meaningless though, especially since we can hardly detect dick at the moment. There could be a civilization on the nearest planet, and unless they completely fucked up their atmosphere or built a super structure, we wouldn't have any way of knowing. Hell, there could be a civilization in our own solar system, and we could still miss it.

>There could be a civilization on the nearest planet
Meaning the nearest planet outside the solar system, that is... Or the second statement would be rather pointless.

I like to merge the Fermi paradox and the birthday paradox and consider the probability of the existence of two different life forms from two different planets ever meeting each other, I don't care if it doesn't involve us; it's a cool thing that's very likely happening.

We do know there's a fuckload more planets than we ever imagined there being though - which bumps the numbers of the Drake Equation up quite a bit. (Even though most of them we can only infer the existence of by the wobble they create on the stars they orbit - so, we wouldn't know.)

Universe is a big place - Star Wars is probably happening, out there, somewhere, in a galaxy far, far, away - but thankfully, not ours. (So far as we can tell, so far...)

>there could be a civilization in our own solar system
Mars, the only place where this is feasible has been roved to death. Unless you buy into that gas aliens operating from a higher dimension on Neptune woo that was posted here a month ago then I don't see how this is possible.

As for another nearby planet NASA said that one day they'll be able to get optical images of even the clouds so we would know one day.

>What is your personal explanation for the fermi paradox?
Technological civilizations are rare, short-lived, and spread across astronomical distances.

Europa... Can't see dick under that ice, but we know there's water under it.

...Also any geologically active planet or even planetoid with ice can, theoretically, have life in it. A whole civilization seems a bit unlikely, but possibly.

We're also frantically looking for a planet with the mass of Neptune out beyond that same orbit, based on gravitational scattering. Granted, anything out that far would be cold as fuck, but ya never know - if it's geologically active, or has transplants on it.

We only have low resolution images of a fraction of the surface of the planets in the system, and high resolution images of maybe four, and have no real idea at all what's going on beneath any of those surfaces. The only objects we've well ruled out are Mars and the Moon, and even there, while its slim and unlikely, we've not been real thorough.

...and of course we can say fuck all about the planets beyond the solar system.

>What is your personal explanation for the fermi paradox?

There are a shitton of species around our level of technology. And those few that have made it far past this level of technology and mastered interstellar travel and communication don't care to make themselves known to us because. We're just one species of dumb animals out of many. They have much more important things to do. At most, their interactions might just be a few biologist types stealthily examining a specimen or two.

Meh, at that tech level they could probably take a single sample of DNA from any creature on the planet, and make permutations for every possible evolutionary outcome, forward and backward, based on that and the geological models they could get just by flying by.

I suppose you eventually get to the tech level where your models and ASIs are so good and streamlined that exploring the material universe gets to be pointless.

Hmm I guess. I too hold out for the possibility of Europan squid people. NASA is supposed to launch a rover there in 2022 so we will see.

Time.

Life and evolution takes an extreme amount of time to just get started. Then it takes extreme amounts of time to get to the point of deep space travel. Even given an infinite number of life sustainable planets, how long is it before something happens and the planet drifts, or is destroyed, or one of the many conditions that must be within a certain tolerance is altered?

Plus the issue of deep space travel is non-trivial and possibly a practical impossibility. All the theories depend on discovering some scientific magic that allows for the breaking some fundamental law of nature. Do you really understand what it means to travel to even neighboring star systems at sub light speed? The fuel? Generating power while between stars? Constructing a closed ecosystem so energy efficient it would last for hundreds of generations?

Gas the Neanderthals

In this artificial ecosystem we have created for ourselves - no, evolution does not happen anymore. Survival is guaranteed for pretty much everyone in the civilized world, thus all genes survive. And whatever beneficial mutation might pop up will be washed away in the ocean of other mediocre genes that make it as well.

If you are talking about "information based evolution" then leave it that instead of making a broad statement like "civilization increases evolution exponentially". Evolution is about genetics. That has not increased exponentially because of our civilization. It decreased exponentially that is has effectively come to a halt.

Also, all that progress you have just praised would even be made faster with some applied genetic evolution making us all smarter.
Personally I even believe we will hit a brick wall in science if we don't become more intelligent. There's a reason why we still have the same petty problems regarding race, gender, sexuality and religion for thousands of years and I primarily blame it on the average person not being smart enough to truly understand their solutions.
I'm saying that as an example regarding for "not being smart enough to advance". And that's applicable on many other things.
We will stay borderline apes for all eternity, with the same ape problems if we don't take genetic evolution serious. We have disregarded it for too long in the past thousands of years were we focused too much on making life comfortable and easy even for the lowest humanity has to offer, without considering the damage it does to our species.
Our weapons and our technology to control others advance and become more dangerous while we ourselves haven't advanced. Our species is like a child.
That's my answer to the fermi paradox. Most species won't turn self-aware about their genetic inadequacies soon enough and end up killing themselves with the knowledge and technology they couldn't handle.

are you aware of how big the universe is? if weve been sending light-speed signals into space for the last lets say 100 years, and they've been sent in every direction, then we have covered about 0.000205% of the milky way

Why would you want to gas the Dutch?

Its always been my opinion that all advanced species will eventually destroy themselves. Just look at all the close calls in the cold war where we could have been set back eternities, if not killed off entirely.

And just as the atom bomb was a new and inconceivably powerful device at its creation, the next weapons of mass destruction will likely be as big of a step forward as conventional explosive to atomic.

Each time we get a bigger bomb, its easier to end our timeline. And the longer our timeline goes, the bigger bombs we are bound to make.

stupid aliens are as fucked up as we are
all them brains can't come up with everything just to come here and probe babby's alien orifice

Because we are the first civilization, we will be the ancients

there's also a sad possibility that we are the most advanced civ

how is it not obvious that we, as in our species, were heavily modified (genetically, to harbor higher ranked souls such as ourselves) by a much more advanced, extraterrestrial species?

shit, I know that we're all inbred retards, but to not realize that we're a product of aliens? jeezus people

Does the fermi paradox take into consideration the possibility that it is extremely rare for life to be selected based on intelligence? It seems like it just assumes that if life is on a planet long enough intelligent life will emerge, when that seems like a ridiculously small possibility

Why would an alien want to make contact with a species consumed by fear, hate, greed, insanity, etc?

For example, when I'm in public and see a clearly fucked up person with serious issues, I'll certainly keep an eye on them, but I also won't go out of my way to introduce myself and strike up a conversation. Maybe if such a person were to settle down and show signs of controlling himself, then it might be possible to have a positive interaction, but until then, fuck that shit.

whenever someone does report having seen aliens, they immediately lose all credibility, because aliens don't exist

we know aliens don't exist because no one with any credibility ever sees one

"Unknown objects are operating under intelligent control... It is imperative that we learn where UFOs come from and what their purpose is..." (1)

"Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe that unknown flying objects are nonsense." (2)

— Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, first Director of the CIA, 1947-1950

"Of course UFOs are real, and they are interplanetary. The cumulative evidence for the existence of UFOs is quite overwhelming and I accept the fact of their existence."

— Air Chief Marshall Lord Hugh Dowding, Commanding Officer of the Royal Air Force during WWII

"Let there be no doubt. Alien technology harvested from the infamous saucer crash in Roswell, N.Mex., in July 1947 led directly to the development of the integrated circuit chip, laser and fibre optic technologies, particle beams, electromagnetic propulsion systems, depleted uranium projectiles, stealth capabilities, and many others. How do I know? I was in charge! I think the kids on this planet are wise to the truth, and I think we ought to give it to them. I think they deserve it."

— Colonel Philip Corso, Former head of the Foreign Technology Desk for United States Army Research and Development, National Security Council member, Eisenhower Administration.

there are still plenty of selection factors
for example i would wager that participation in this thread correlates with a lack of reproductive viability

TIL Kilby and Noyce were aliumz

Fermi himself was most likely talking about his pessimism about spacefaring. The whole "paradox" is based on assumptions.
It is pretty much bullshit and I hate when people bring it up when discussing the existence of ayys

4 u

Nah probably just a front for public dissemination. If Top Secret R&D Labs exist and are tasked with advancing the technological progress of society, publishing their findings directly to the scientific community is probably not the best way to go about it.

if you don't recognise that last quote as 100% disinfo then why are you on Veeky Forums

Regardless of disinfo, my point is that if you want to make use of alien tech but don't want to expose the fact that you have it, you have to disseminate it through academic fronts that you fund and control. Well, thats how I would do it at least.

mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/454/2/1811

^ tl;dr earth may have formed earlier than 92% of other habitable planets

phys.org/news/2016-08-earthly-life-premature-cosmic-perspective.html

Pair that with the fact that we don't exactly know how life is supposed to form - but the generally accepted and hardly polished hypothesis suggest that it's fucking hard for life to form.

Thinking that anything can travel between the stars is pretty laughable outside of a tight star cluster.

It is statistically incredibly unlikely that there are successes traversing distances we'd need to traverse to reach nearby systems.

>panspermia

This is such a high school answer.

>100% disinfo

>implying it's true

cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-deactivated-nukes/

Is this disinfo?

>implying there are "shills" spreading "disinfo"
>not just refuting it with facts

i never mentioned shills
why are you saying shills?

Shills is a meme for mentally ill /pol/ types. 'Dinsinfo' is for mentally ill /x/ types, which of course includes the retards who believe in aliens.

>hurr durr you think different to me therefore you are mentally ill

cool "science" bro

>its impossible for people to get paid to shitpost online
The only difference between a shill and yourself is you are poor.

"shill" and "disinfo" are pretty much both terms from typical tinfoil-hatter vocabulary. You will find them on /x/ and /pol/

"Stop spreading dis-info, you lying shill"
Is a typical answer to dismiss something that they disagree with, without giving any reason. Both terms imply a malicious intent to conceive other people.
On Veeky Forums this is usually not considered a good argument

>On Veeky Forums this is usually not considered a good argument
Unless someone comes on and starts citing stuff defending climate change or the fact that cigarettes are bad for you.

>a malicious intent to conceive other people
interesting

i want her to give me head.

or, you know, claiming that lasers, fibre optics, ICs were invented by aliens

...

Still happens a lot here, too. Of course. But most people will actually call someone out for this

what?

No doubt a leak from Hillary's e-mails.

yeah any chance of you sharing the source with us

put an exempt from that text in quotes and feed it to your search engine.
exopolitics.org/Study-Paper-8.htm
is one of the results. some conspiracy mumbo jumbo.
quite the shame, since the concept of an oblivious human civilization signing a treaty with the "wrong extraterrestials" after the first contact sounds like a new and fun concept for a sci-fi novel.

Everyone saying "hurr durr space is like, huge n'shit" is a fucking retard.

1) Even at the speeds of a simple chemical rocket it should take only a few millions years to colonize the whole galaxy. So where the fuck is everyone? I don't give a shit how big space is, its traversable within only a few million years.

2) We will soon be able to detect life remotely via spectroscopy. What will you say when we survey the entire galaxy and all results come back negative?

You'd have to have biological immortality to do that.

Which means you'd have to have a cap on your population, or you would have used up your own planet before you got off it.

Which means you'd have no reason to colonize the whole galaxy.

Thus it wouldn't happen.

At best, you'd colonize one or two backup systems, as once you've done that, there's no (known) cosmological disasters that could wipe out your whole, population capped, species, that don't involve also leaving the galaxy. (Or in the case of vacuum decay, the universe.)

...Which is another possible Great Filter. It may turn out that top quark isn't stable, and this whole universe is thus ultimately doomed. It maybe as soon as a civilization has the technology to measure that top quark and realize that, they also have the technology to create another universe (theoretically possible), and thus fuck off to their own, more stable, created universe. Any universe so created would be moving away from ours at, effectively, faster than the speed of light so it wouldn't interact with ours, and the theoretical mega device used to create it may very well go along for the ride, thus no evidence of the civilization would be left behind.

>You'd have to have biological immortality to do that.

Except you don't. You could have generation ships, suspended animation, or any number of things. Biological immortality is just one possibility.

>Which means you'd have to have a cap on your population, or you would have used up your own planet before you got off it.

This doesn't make any sense.

>Which means you'd have no reason to colonize the whole galaxy.

Accommodate a growing population or for reasons of exploration/curiosity/science

>It maybe as soon as a civilization has the technology to measure that top quark and realize that, they also have the technology to create another universe (theoretically possible), and thus fuck off to their own

It'd be nice if the left a note and instructions with a beacon...

I mean, I'd like to think we'd do that, in the same situation, unless there's some risk of all these created universes fucking with each other somehow. ...In which case you might just engineer that field collapse on your way out to make sure no one follows.

there is very little reason to leave your own solar system. Even if FTL travel is not difficult.