The Fermi Paradox

[flyspyro]

Everyone is basing this on the fact that the government says they have not found anything. I can think of many reasons why the government would lie about it. Im sure there are aliens out there that don't want to mess with our evolution.

Here is something to think about and maybe someone can explain this to me.. We have telescopes that can see to the edge of our known universe but when you look at all the photos from our own solar system it's blured or shown from a distance so we can't see much.. why is that? most pictures on mars are gray. We have moons full of oceans and they are trying to sell me that there is no life.. I call bullshit.. There is life everywhere.. it may not be like us but I know there are at least microbes.

[Azadina]

Everyone is basing this on the fact that the government says they have not found anything. I can think of many reasons why the government would lie about it. Im sure there are aliens out there that don't want to mess with our evolution.

Here is something to think about and maybe someone can explain this to me.. We have telescopes that can see to the edge of our known universe but when you look at all the photos from our own solar system it's blured or shown from a distance so we can't see much.. why is that? most pictures on mars are gray. We have moons full of oceans and they are trying to sell me that there is no life.. I call bullshit.. There is life everywhere.. it may not be like us but I know there are at least microbes.

Because what those telescopes show is more or less irrelevant, when it comes to determining if random planets have life or not. 10 light years away there could be people walking on the planets, and we simply wouldn't see it. Even seeing the planets is complicated.

[Poopymonster]

There probably is lots of other lifeforms out there, call them aliens for the sake of ease.

Technologically superior to anything we have, I think they've looked at our planet, seen humans evolve, grow, work together, and decided "once they become Civilized we'll show ourselves.", every century or three they pop back, peek, and "Once they become Civilized we'll show ourselves." They see how we treat others of our kind, and hope they become Civilized.

I have a feeling it's going to be a really long time before they show themselves to us.

[Collegeguy]

I love his channel.

If you like that, you should check out his friend the science fiction author John Michael Godier.

[Doskie]

Simulated Realities, while fun to dismiss, isn't that far out of a reason why other life hasn't discovered us. Aliens haven't found us, because they aren't looking, because they're virtually not even present. If the universal model of sentient societies like ours, we can bet they don't really have any concern with anything outside of their perspective, and probably have found their utpoia in spaces similar to our internet. We ourselves are on the cusp of living entirely in virtual spaces, basically rendering the known physical world useless to us, outside of sustaining our bodies. I would imagine its no different for extra-terrestrials.

[dwarven]

Everyone is basing this on the fact that the government says they have not found anything. I can think of many reasons why the government would lie about it. Im sure there are aliens out there that don't want to mess with our evolution.

Here is something to think about and maybe someone can explain this to me.. We have telescopes that can see to the edge of our known universe but when you look at all the photos from our own solar system it's blured or shown from a distance so we can't see much.. why is that? most pictures on mars are gray. We have moons full of oceans and they are trying to sell me that there is no life.. I call bullshit.. There is life everywhere.. it may not be like us but I know there are at least microbes.

We have telescopes that can see other galaxies, because galaxies are really really bright. But our radio telescope optic tech I'd argue is very poor for the purpose of catching alien transmissions. Just because signal strength falls off at long distances. The only way I could see us detecting an alien radio transmission is if it was a hugely boosted signal pointed right at us with intent. Catching an errant signal is unlikely because it would probably be too weak by the time it got to us for us to even notice it, let alone conclude that it's artificial.

As for higher resolution images of other planets, scientists prefer to look in the infrared, ultraviolet and radio spectra rather than visible light. Visible spectrum makes for pretty pictures, but other than that it doesn't give us a whole lot of data.

[Darsithis]

Everyone is basing this on the fact that the government says they have not found anything. I can think of many reasons why the government would lie about it. Im sure there are aliens out there that don't want to mess with our evolution.

Here is something to think about and maybe someone can explain this to me.. We have telescopes that can see to the edge of our known universe but when you look at all the photos from our own solar system it's blured or shown from a distance so we can't see much.. why is that? most pictures on mars are gray. We have moons full of oceans and they are trying to sell me that there is no life.. I call bullshit.. There is life everywhere.. it may not be like us but I know there are at least microbes.

We don't really see things out there. We infer most of the planets based on how they routinely dim their parent star. Very little of the galaxy has been directly photographed and observed, and that's mostly things in our own solar system. Outside of that, only large-scale composites of places like nebula and star cluters have been seen. Everything else is inferred based on their interaction.

[Total Crica]

Life should be common. However, we have found zero evidence of it besides us.

I'd just like to hear what you all think the solution could be.

Solution? You mean the answer why we don't find other life? The simplest answer is because we are not equipped to be able to perceive it. Or perhaps, we don't exist to begin with. There really isn't an answer, only more questions, for as long as we are able to think we exist.

[dwarven]

The simplest answer is because we are not equipped to be able to perceive it.

Yes, I agree with that. A paradox implies we can potentially detect it, so there probably is no paradox to begin with.

[Rustedsaint]

I’m fond off that the theory that aliens/NASA just don’t Want to actually deal with us, we butcher our own people for no reason. God knows what we would do if aliens crashed landed on our planet

[S7orm]

My personal theory is that civilizations develop sentient AI long before they can start interstellar exploration, bringing said civilization to an end before it has a chance to explore other worlds

Or nukes. As the population and education level of said civilization grows, so is the probability of giving birth to an idiot who will acquire the know how and resources to build and throw them at random.

[BloodyAngel12]

Even if we found intelligent life, the distance alone would prohibit effective communication.

" I'll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right?"

[Mystrome]

I don't think anyone can truly comprehend the immense size of the observable universe:



Each circle represents a factor 10, meaning the next one is 10 times bigger than the previous one.

[Powerogue]

The solution is that even though life, statistically speaking, likely exists elsewhere, we're never going to be able to make any meaningful contact with it due to restrictions in technology and physics.

Picture this ideal scenario: We find a planet very visibly inhabited by sentient life 10 million lightyears away with our super-advanced telescopes. We've invented spaceships that can travel at lightspeed indefinitely while containing human passengers. We set off, 10 million years later we're there and we find that the planet has been sucked into a black hole and it's gone forever. In fact it was gone before we even got there, due to the light we received having taken 10 million years to get to us in the first place. They would've sent somebody, but when they looked all they saw were dinosaurs, no sentient life of any significance to warrant such a journey.

So we look back at earth, go "oh, it still looks fine to me." 10 million years later, we're there, and sorry, we've nuked the planet into an uninhabitable wasteland while you were gone. Everyone's dead.

So I don't worry that much about it.

I’m fond off that the theory that aliens/NASA just don’t Want to actually deal with us, we butcher our own people for no reason. God knows what we would do if aliens crashed landed on our planet

Kill them for looking and talking different than us, obviously. Some of us still can't get over melanin levels, there's no way we're advanced enough to handle tentacles.

[Total Crica]

Yes, I agree with that. A paradox implies we can potentially detect it, so there probably is no paradox to begin with.

We don't know if there is or isn't a paradox. That's the point.

We don't know if we can perceive everything there is to perceive.

Even if we could perceive everything there is to perceive, how would we know we were able to?

[Shakadam]

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned yet but there's also the possibility that we are simply the first or among the first intelligent species to evolve.

The Earth is ~4.54 billion years old. We are the first species to evolve and survive to a point where we can have this discussion.

The Universe is ~13.799 billion years old. We can safely assume that the first few billions of years were way too chaotic for life to have a chance to evolve sufficiently, and it's possible that conditions have simply been to harsh for life until now. All it takes is a large asteroid or one of a dozen other possible extinction events to wipe clean all progress.

I'm not saying we're the only ones here, there might be other civilizations out there separated by such vast distances that we haven't yet made contact, but there might not have been enough time yet for an intergalactic society to evolve.

The Universe is, after all, still young and stars will continue to be "born" for another estimated 1-100 trillion years.

[Allerius]

There are so many solutions to the Fermi it shouldn't even be called a paradox. It only sounds puzzling because it states a bunch of unfounded assumptions as near facts.

The easiest solution is to just question the probability of life formation assumption. Maybe life developing is so rare and challenging that only one species progressing to sentience so far is expected (or even surpassing expectations). There's no data to the contrary.

[dwarven]

There are so many solutions to the Fermi it shouldn't even be called a paradox. It only sounds puzzling because it states a bunch of unfounded assumptions as near facts.

The easiest solution is to just question the probability of life formation assumption. Maybe life developing is so rare and challenging that only one species progressing to sentience so far is expected (or even surpassing expectations). There's no data to the contrary.

The data to the contrary is the mediocrity principle. The idea that if you pick up a random rock, it's probably going to be just an average rock instead of an exceptional one with a gold nugget in it or something. So far we know the universe doesn't make unique things. There are billions of everything.

[Allerius]

The data to the contrary is the mediocrity principle. The idea that if you pick up a random rock, it's probably going to be just an average rock instead of an exceptional one with a gold nugget in it or something. So far we know the universe doesn't make unique things. There are billions of everything.

The mediocrity principle isn't data and it's not even an argument as much as a guiding framework for practical purposes. We don't know jack shit about the universe but what we do know in no way suggests we aren't unique. Where are all the other sapients?

[dwarven]

The mediocrity principle isn't data and it's not even an argument as much as a guiding framework for practical purposes. We don't know jack shit about the universe but what we do know in no way suggests we aren't unique. Where are all the other sapients?

It’s not data specifically about aliens, but it is generally true for everything we do have data on. And the argument is so strong that it was Carl Sagan’s response when asked if there is life besides ours. In fact, the Fermi paradox itself requires it to be valid, which accounts for one half of the paradox.