So what are the non-meme explanations for this?
Fermi's Paradox
Jaxon Adams
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Luke Baker
>No intelligent life out there
>Intelligent life exists, but it's rare and so is spaced too infrequently to ever notice each other
These are the only non-meme explanations.
Robert Anderson
Which is scarier?
Levi Myers
>make up formula
>assume the order of magnitude of 5 of the variables
>be surprised it doesn't match observation
Gee, I wonder what the ingenious answer is for this paradox.
It couldn't simply be that the chance of life forming and surviving for billions of years is on the order of 10^-100 instead of the assumed 10^-30
Carson Jones
there is literally nothing to explain
Liam Thompson
they dont want to be found
Alexander Butler
If we're alone, ask yourself why, then get fucking terrified.
Liam Anderson
No civilization is advanced enough for interstellar travel yet
Or interstellar travel is so impractical as to be rendered impossible
The "Great Filter" is a meme
David Lopez
Brainlet's """Paradox"""
Brayden Miller
en.wikipedia.org
There are dozens of possible explanations, 20 in the link above.
The real question should be: "why were you expecting to meet/find aliens?"
We occupy a tiny spec of dust in a vast cosmos, and it's only been the last century or two that we would recognize aliens as such.
Let's say there's been a million visits to Earth by aliens with the intent of contacting any intelligent life here.
I'm not talking about the occasional fly-by that we might still not detect or recognize.
I'm not talking about stealthy visits to mutilate cattle or probe a few hillbillies.
No, a MILLION "take me to your leader" style visits.
The Earth has been here for 4.6 billion years.
Let's say we only count the post-Hadean era, that's 4 billion years.
So a million visits would mean one every 4,000 years on average.
All of recorded history is only 6,000 years, so we can expect one, maybe two visits in all of recorded history.
So maybe one or two stories of a god descending from the skies is an actual alien visit, and that's the level of contact I'd expect from a million attempts to contact us in person.
The "great silence" is the result of the inverse square law.
We couldn't pick up broadcasts as powerful as our own at interstellar distances (see link above).
Fermi asked why we can't see any of their "great works", when even today, we still don't have the instruments required to detect a Dyson sphere.
Aside from wondering why aliens haven't set up permanent residence here, there is NO mystery.
It's all just hubris.