Fermi Paradox

The Fermi "Paradox", the idea that the Universe is so big that intelligent life exists out of Earth, and ... that the Universe is also so big that we will never meet each other. Woah, what a Paradox

Maybe there just hasn't been enough time for hyper-advanced civilizations to form

Yeah I know it's been a few billions years but it took a few billion years for humans to pop up and of all the millions upon millions of species that have been on Earth, we've been the only ones capable of civilization

If there are any intelligent aliens in our galaxy, it is unlikely that they would visit us. Assuming they have the ability to travel between stars, they are more advanced than we are and we aren't going to be answering any mysteries of the universe for them. Furthermore, any material wealth they could get here, they could just as easily get elsewhere without potentially having to deal with uppity primitives.

If they are more advanced than us, we are also unlikely to pick up their radio transmissions because 1.) they are so far away that the SNR on anything they sent early on is below detection threshold and 2.) they, like us, got really good at not wasting energy spewing signals all over the place and instead use directed transmissions (Earth is dimming as a radio source due to better directed transmissions). So, how are we supposed to see them?

Another problem with Fermi's paradox is that the universe has a finite age with a rather limited time frame in which the elements necessary for advanced life have existed. Compound this with the massive distances involved and the sheer number of stars, it is highly unlikely that we would find anyone out there unless we did a highly detailed radio survey of every single star in the galaxy, and that still requires that we aren't the most advanced people in the galaxy (there is literally no reason this couldn't be the case) and that we all discovered radio transmission at the right time for the transmissions to have made it far enough to matter.

There's a difference between likelihood of life and likelihood of finding life.

Real world math just doesn't add up to your fairy tale math. I'll repeat.

Space is fuck huge and attenuation is a real bitch.

Every single signal from earth will never reach any planet outside the solar system and still remain intelligible enough to even be recognized as something that came from an intelligent source even if you on/off the signal to do binary. In order to signal other planets out there you need massive amounts of power. As in using the entire sun as a fucking lighthouse by blocking light in the direction of the target planet and banging out binary. Anything less power than a solar lighthouse just won't cut through the attenuation problem.

Maybe there has been time for plenty of super-enlightened and advanced species to evolve, but it turns out that we are actually on to something when we talk about the speed of light being an absolute speed limit and there just isn't any way around that what with warp drives or wormholes are anything. Maybe there are actually a bajillion hyper-intelligent species in the universe and they figured out shit on their home planet and they will never exist anywhere else.

Actually no, the bigger the space is, there more shit you have to look through in order to even hope to find something. Do you know how little we have actually looked? The only exoplanets that we have cataloged are relatively nearby, and we haven't come close to cataloging even a percent of the number of planets that are likely within that range. Why haven't we found life? We are fucking working on it.

Is it possible for Type II and III civilizations to hide themselves?

If darkbmatter is a thing maybe advanced civilizations hide from one another using a dark matter cloak around their shit.

I have a feeling we'll never figure out what darkmatter is. I've read a bunch of papers recently and physicists eliminated almost all rangers for possible darkmatter particle energies. There's very little range left. I'm pessimistic that DM particles are in those slivers of unexplored spaces.

I wonder how badly the physics will stagnate for the next 20 years.,.. unless the AI takes over physics research.

If you have an error in your modeling and have crossed out all the possible clarifications, your model is just wrong.

Physics will only stagnate of physicists decide they're okay with being just wrong and doing it anyway

ST is just a giant dead-end. It's a black hole for research right now. Nothing will change until ST heavyweights die off.

>>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers's_paradox
that's a pretty shitty paradox. You can explain it with light cones and observable universe.

>Redpill me
gtfo pill-popping /pol/esmoker

It is a normie phrase now used by everyone.

>thinks Veeky Forums board communities are different
fuck off back to plebbit

With the huge potential for varience between species you can't assume that anything would be "rare"

Haha you've successfully outted yourself. You have to go back

intelligent life is probably so rare that they are fucking around in a different galaxy altogether, far beyond any distance we could ever travel or communicate

>so rare
Why would be rare?

Why would be common? [sic]

liteyears away

because of statistics.

because you need to have literally a million things happen exactly right for there to be any chance of life at all and there have been millions and millions of species and we are the only ones who created civilization

Millions of planets, billions of years for evolution to do its thing.

Life is not rare at all.

wrong
according to everything we know it's probably incredibly rare
and intelligence is not some kind of evolutionary goal, it's literally an accident, one path out of infinite

>according to everything we know it's probably incredibly rare
That's absolutely not true. We're finding life on earth in all kinds of "inhospitable" places. Life can be found in pretty much any place on Earth. That's amazing.

Life is not rare.

Hiding inside of Dyson spheres that create a more appealing simulation for them than sensory reality.

Unless of course the universe is simply a fractal of Boltzmann Brains.

>according to everything we know
>thinking we know anything

it's likely we're already a simulation ourselves, and most of our lives aren't very appealing at all.

>on earth

nobody said that except you

I pointed out that our matrix of sensory input is already a simulated reality, but advanced species have probably found ways to hack it so they don't have to deal with external physical stimuli.

What if the only feasible method of space travel is through a frequency of light we have not been able to detect yet, so there's aliens warping all around the sky and we see nothing

Until there's at least one big ass telescope somewhere between here and saturn's orbit and preferably dedicated to looking for the correct thing its somewhat pointless to ask about ayys.
There should have been moon bases and scopes there by now, alas.

That's one possible answer noob

Why did you not finish the last assertion with "on earth" as you did the others?

Think about computers or DNA manipulation, they don't need much energy.
An advanced civilization could have no interest for all that energy, but it would have been difficult to understand by someone from the 70's.

>according to everything we know it's probably incredibly rare
The only thing we (almost) know for certain is that billions of earth-like planets exist.
All the rest is pure speculation, yours included.

Unless the odds are 1 in a couple trillion. The fermi paradox is faulty. It doesn't know what the odds of intelligent life are, so it cannot claim that absence of life is a paradox.

>where are they?
The (((chosen among the alliens))) pushed the lesser hordes to the top of society in a struggle for equality and the scientific development stopped.

>What if the only feasible method of space travel is through a frequency of light we have not been able to detect yet, so there's aliens warping all around the sky and we see nothing
Hmm... that's against known laws of physics.

>fermi paradox is faulty
... or maybe we're in a simulation.

Why is the jump from 2 to 3 so high holy shit

Is it even possible to become type 1? If any kind of FTL travel becomes possible, it will be easier to just go to multiple planets than to try to maximize a single one. Harnessing all the resources of a single planet would just be an engineering exercise by that point.

it's a meme scale anyway
2 and 3 are literal fiction

Except even with the universe being huge we should be able to detect them if they exist anywhere in the observable universe.

fuck man, if you just go to kikepedia and look at their page on it, it lists most of what any of us would say

I'll add what I think is the most likely reason: Technology advances very quickly. All this time with life on earth, and we only started getting tech a few 10k's ago, and only in the past 100 years or so has their been anything that gets out into space. In another 100 years, we might be long post-singularity, and we literally can't know what we'll be like after that, and therefor any aliens who are post-singularity probably won't be recognizable either. Consider that an ant crawling around in your house has zero conception of what a house or a human being is, likewise we might be all around aliens and just not have the brains to realize it.

okay, how do you send message to ayys billion light years from here

or detect them, whatever dude

Humans are gods chosen children, aliens don't exist

There are many possible doomsday scenarios which can easily end a civilisation.
-climate change
-thermonuclear war
-deadly viruses
-degeneration
-voting for retards as president
- etc.
Or they just are happy at home.

There is only one narrow winding path to become an galactic empire. See it positive. We got the chance to be the first. So we better be smart and don't screw up.

OP's pic is from The Dark Forest (one of the best sci-fi novels in the last 10 years or more) and in it the author explains the idea of 'dark forest' and proposes a solution to Fermi Paradox.

I think it's by far the most logical explanation for it.

Read this:
whatever.scalzi.com/2014/11/11/the-big-idea-liu-cixin/

Why is encryption never mentioned when talking about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? The time between humanity using radio in a large scale and most of that traffic being encrypted (and indistinguishable from natural noise) is close to just a century. That alone would make the window for detecting intelligent life from Earth incredibly short.

...

>(one of the best sci-fi novels in the last 10 years or more)
Hm
I read The Three Body Problem and it was pretty shit, people on Veeky Forums are saying to read the Dark Forest though and it's supposedly much better than the first part of the trilogy.
But I'm not sure if I'll ever read it.

TDF is much better than TBP. It should have been one book but I'm happy it was split in 2.

Anyway, definitely the best sci-fi series I read in the last 10 years (and I read almost all of the Hugo Prize winners and nominees.

We've covered everything besides nuclear war but the right wingers are trying their best to remedy that.

>not a good answer

Actually, it's a perfectly good answer.

The Fermi """"""paradox""""""is the most unfounded asspull of all time. You know that your dealing with a peanut baby bird brain when they want to discuss its implications in earnest, as if it had any grounding to observed reality whatsoever.
This.

all alien life in the known universe is up my ass

>a normie phrase
gtfo normie

100 million stars in that patch... minimum.

because the jump from 1 to 2 is just as massive

t. uninspired brainlets

a k2 is literally just a swarm of solar collectors all around a star
a k3 is those solar collectors around every star
it is entire possible to get to every star in the galactic supercluster at sublight speeds, it naturally takes a long ass time to do, but life extension tech could make such wait times meaningless

More likely is that they will be near abundant energy sources, perhaps near the centre of galaxies, where stars and black holes are closer together. These are places that we would consider as too hostile for our idea of primitive life.

The idea is if you have the capacity to harness the majority of power from one star, you then have essentially enough power to keep doing it ad-infinitum. You've got the power to strip your entire star system of resources, build generation ships or automated factories and shoot them off to other solar systems where they'll replicate the same so on and so forth.

Dark Forest theory is definitely the best explanation for the Fermi Paradox, an explanation I hope isn't true...

Have you read Death's End yet? Holy shit. I was not ready for that...

The paradox doesn't know the odds of life to state what the deal is honestly BUT I'll run with it.

>We are the first
>The Halo Array had to be fired to keep the intergalactic Jew at bay 65 million years ago.
>Our multi-billion light year section of the universe is actually new and we lack the technology to see what's really going on: we are too juvenile to have the technology requires to see far into space where the others are.
>That enormous cold spot is actually the void left by a civilization that used all its energy to hop to a different universe that isn't at risk of heat death.

>That enormous cold spot is actually the void left by a civilization that used all its energy to hop to a different universe that isn't at risk of heat death.
Thanks for the book idea non, I'll give you 1% of the profits.

Learn 2 evolutionary biology n00b.

>Have you read Death's End yet? Holy shit. I was not ready for that...
I'm 1/4 in (reading the Gravity chase after that starship right now). I've been told it's the best of the three... pls don't spoil it for me.

Underneath the ice of Enceladus and Europa

>I've been told it's the best of the three... pls don't spoil it for me.
It is. No spoilers here.

When I said "that" I meant the entire book. Liu Cixin is brilliant.
Have fun!

stop meming
it's a lot more than "swarm"
you can mine the whole system empty to make them and you'll still be nowhere close to collecting all the energy from the sun

Their African equivalent filtered them out.

A civilization capable of space-flight would have conquered most natural selective processes and also have a predisposition to cooperation and some level of altruism/some other instinct to help their fellow being. This means that the dumbest and aggressive would breed enough to bring down the average forever.

Thanks user!

>Liu Cixin is brilliant.
No doubt there. He surprised me at almost every step and his level of strategic and scientific thinking is excellent. I hope he writes something new and I hope it doesn't take 4+ years to translate it to English.

As for his resolution of Fermi Paradox, I think it's true because it makes perfect sense. It's game theory afterall.

Doing a real shit job at it tbqh.

I still think it's just comets.

youtube.com/watch?v=uY65P4Klkbw

Probably living in some kind of weird alien sexual matrix. Opting out of reality for a virtual utopia is a legitimate strategy and I don't want to hear from anyone who tells me it isn't.

Odds of life on any one star is one in a trillion, though. It's a once in a galaxy thing.

>Odds of life on any one star is one in a trillion, though. It's a once in a galaxy thing.
What do you base your odds on?

well the light bubble of our radio signals into space is relatively small, so they might not know were here. also the first transmission we sent into space is Hitler's speech at the Berlin Olympics, sonthey might just not want to associate with us. there could be a star trek style non interventionist clause as part of the galactic government or deep space travel may be impossible.

an advanced civilization would have no need for energy.

no need for the only thing that can locally reverse entropy by highly organized and sophisticated structures

Nah I wouldn't want to "start over" like this, if I did some VR shit I'd opt to keep my memories

Light speed is very slow compared to interstellar distances. Assuming warp drives won't ever work the probability of finding other civilizations is small.

Any advanced civilization in this galaxy can see Earth and knows it is a planet with complex life. You cannot hide something like that.

Any advanced civilization in this galaxy can easily build a huge laser and point it towards the general vicinity of the solar system. We ought to see their signals by now.

Fermi paradox is a genuine paradox and the most logical solution is that we are alone in this galaxy (or even this local group of galaxies).

A generous 50-50 chance that the 50 most basic filters to intelligent life are passed. I say intelligent life because that's the only kind you can detect without going to a planet to confirm it. That's important to the fermi paradox because a potential solution to it is that life is common, but we can't detect it since it's non-complex or dumb, and unintelligent life doesn't exactly broadcast its position (literally). The filters used include factors owing to a habitable solar system, a habitable planet, the evolution of prokaryotes, eukaryotes, ect. The probability of success is 1 in 0.5^50, assuming the odds average to 50% each. That's a big number. Enough for a couple galaxies of stars. Ours is a relatively big galaxy, however. We should see intelligent life form around just one star, assuming the odds are close to reality.

But we don't know the true odds. You can't calculate the statistics when you've only seen something happen once. You just know it's not especially common or that you haven't looked for repeat events hard enough/long enough. This is just an exercise to show how fast cumulative probability can get very big or very small and how that can explain why the fermi paradox may in fact not be a paradox at all. If the odds of each filter being passed averages to 33%, then life is a once in a universe event because you get a number bigger than all the stars in the observable universe. On the other hand, if the odds of each filter being passed are around 66%, then civilisations would number in hundreds per galaxy. Cumulative probably is like that.

I recommend Issac Arthur's big ass video on the femi paradox if you want to understand my line of thinking more. He lists every filter that should need to be passed for life to get to our point, then uses the same kind of calculation that I have to give examples of how varied the odds could be.

youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA

How do you know you didn't want to? How do you know your real self hasn't decided to go into an ancestor simulation for a laugh and agreed to have his or her pre-existing memories temporarily removed before going in? You'll never know until you die.

>We're finding life on earth in all kinds of "inhospitable" places. Life can be found in pretty much any place on Earth. That's amazing.

Life is not rare.

A more correct statement would be carbon based life is not rare, the only other traces of life we've observed have been silicone based life. The life we do observe that survives in hostile environments have been only extremophile archaea real rudimentary life, tardigrades are the closest thing to intelligent life and their again rudimentary animals the only thing notable about them is their size in microbiology.

lolno

It's near impossible to actually think of making a predictable model for this shit, this shits as reputable as astrology. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry
Your even more fucked when trying to predict intelligence of species as well, this "paradox" is a meme.

God I hope your depressing prediction isn't true mang I wan to be in my 80s when interstellar space travel picks up and we use the mass relay to travel in between systems while simultaneously using dark matter to levitate niggers around.

I remember that one time scientists thought Saturns rings oscillating were a message from ET kek.

Lul Asexual life is the most common do you even biology? Asexual reproduction is more promising than sexual because of the sheer ability to reproduce at fast rates, it doesn't matter if you lack genetic diversity to overcome a pathogen if there's 1000 offspring.

ITT: actually interesting shit for once though this paradox is a meme it seems to evoke a lot of deep bullshit or otherwise science related topics which take from all sects of science.

This boards made a bit of a comeback me thinks.