Yes, but the being committing the genocide is itself sentient and extremely hardy. A pool of those things conquers the solar system and then the stars. Sucks for us as a species, but it still doesn’t explain the Fermi Paradox. The being that kills everything has to be simultaneously hyper capable and extremely stupid.
Interesting ideas on AI guys. Maybe the “tech event” that prevents reaching a point where a species colonizes or reaches out enough to be readily detected is…virtual reality?
Why would you want to physically go ‘out there’ when you can just plug into your own little fantasy and live there? …I mean maybe YOU would…but you’re going to need a lot of YOUs to amass the resources to do so. Kind of hard to do when most of your fellow hairless apes are lying in pods.
Just spitballing there.
As this thread so clearly demonstrates, there is a world of difference between “I have thought of one possible explanation for the Fermi paradox” and “I have solved the Fermi paradox!”
People have been kicking around possible solutions for years and years and years. That’s not a new thing. But for us to be able to actually point at one of these possible solutions and say, “yep, that’s the one!” will require actual hard EVIDENCE. We won’t and cannot no for sure until we go out there and look and see what we can see.
TL;DR: thread title is wrong.
Imagine all of the contingencies which have led to your current existence (elsewhere there are not one but two threads on whether killing Hitler would eliminate your [future] existence). Not only would taking away just one ancestor from your timeline instantly eliminate your existence, so would having someone (say) jostle your dad while he was in line to pay for the flowers he was bringing home to your mom the night you were conceived.
Likewise, for just one civilization to exist, it would have to run an immense gauntlet of possible existence-eliminators. If we fail to avoid just one, our species and our civilization never happens:
The wrong star
The wrong (or no) moon
The wrong mix of elements
Too much/not enough liquid water
Too much/not enough gravity
Too far/too close to the galatic center
And that is BEFORE life can form! Then we have
The wrong contingency which leads to another kind of life forming and/or evolving
The wrong physical tools (dolphins can’t build much of anything)
The wrong asteriod
The wrong [other planetary catastrophe]
Etc. etc. etc.
Likewise once our species DOES evolve, with the right physical tools and brain power…
To then claim that, only at the very end, do we run into an unstoppable roadblock on the highway to the stars, is to ignore all of the contingencies that have led to that point in the first place.
This is one of the items David Brin points to as a possible explanation. But he suggests that it isn’t an insuperable objection. All you need is a few Luddites, a few outsiders and loners, a few rugged individualists who don’t plug in, but go out exploring.
After all, take the Victorian era: comfort and riches and anyone with any resources is enjoying the benefits of Society…except for a few incredibly vigorous chappies who go searching for the South Pole. There will always be such individuals.
Exactly. And those individuals copy themselves or breed somehow. (probably at this level of tech there would be a way to just clone yourself and all your memories directly, and “breeding” would be a controlled merge with another person, and the “child” would be as capable as an expert adult the moment it is born)
Fast forward about a million years, and our entire galaxy has these beings occupying every star and habitable place (for some kind of machine phase matter) there is. If the intergalactic gulfs are crossable, and if interstellar travel is possible, they probably are, then this infestation of life would eventually spread to other galaxies as well.
Copying someone’s brain to a computer may be something we may never know if it works. Sure, they seem like the same person, but did the original person die? Even our best chance, doing it gradually over time, doesn’t answer that.
And the Fermi paradox isn’t one and doesn’t need to be solved. It just makes a ton of assumptions, all of which can be questioned.
Copying someone’s brain to a computer works if the resulting entity is sentient and can access the memories of the original. Doesn’t matter if it’s an exact match, and it’s actually unreasonable to expect that.
The Fermi paradox matters because it has ominous implications for our own existence. What are we missing here? If technology works like how we think it works, either life is incredibly rare or there’s a trap we don’t see.
If a race of aliens were advanced enough to travel here, why would they want to meet us? What could we possibly offer them, except tasty, gooey, nutritious brains? I’d assume they’d only want to interact with us to stroke their own egos, if they could travel here there isn’t likely to be anything we could teach them, and they’d have probably left behind the problem of insecurity thousands of years ago.
I imagine Earth is just seen as a nature reserve, with hairless apes being a protected species in this part of the galaxy. The planet may come in useful one day and until then there’s no point in coming here.
The mystery is not why the aliens aren’t here, it’s why they aren’t occupying all the stars we can see through telescopes. Do the aliens not need energy and mass? Are they not under evolutionary forces to spread as far and wide as possible? The most reasonable explanation is there aren’t any. Which is the paradox. Life on earth evolved, there are probably millions of similar planets within our own galaxy, why haven’t other species showed up a little ahead of earth and taken over?
They may be occupying lots of planets, I read there are approximately 100 planets for every grain of sand on Earth, but we don’t have sufficient technology to see them or traces of them. Maybe they don’t need much energy or mass and have ceased to be organic matter, and see us as very primate lifeforms with nothing to offer them. Possibly they now operate in a virtual reality (or we do), and that virtual reality missed the software patch for extra-terrestrials. :dubious:
I think this is getting closest to the reason, except I don’t believe the conclusion about earth-like planets existing long before earth.
I believe Fermi speculated that if there are many civilizations out there, it’s vanishingly small that we would be one of the older ones; that a civilization a billion years older than us is likely to exist and could have sent probes throughout the galaxy by now that we would have detected, even at below light speeds.
The universe is about 15 billion years old. it’s now thought that it took about 10 billion years after the Big Bang for conditions to be such that there were planets with heavy metals and other sufficiently complex elements to support life. Life began on earth almost as soon as conditions were ready for it, and it took about 5 billions years for us to evolve.
So assuming that’s true, and assuming there are many planets with life, we would be among the more elder life forms. There may be some civilizations that got started a little earlier, or evolved a little quicker, but probably not a billion, maybe not even a million years ahead of us. And we’re isolated by the speed limit of light and the enormous distances involved. Our radio wave footprint is a shell around the earth only about 150 light years in diameter, which is barely a blip.
It turns out the universe is really, really enormous. Let’s say for argument’s sake there are one billion sentient species out there. That’s a huge, practically unimaginable number, almost as many separate species as there are individual people on Earth. Well, the fact is that statistically there’d still only be a 0.5% chance of finding such a species in any given galaxy. And since we like to think there already is one in this particular galaxy, the chance of finding another sentient species around any single one of the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way would be about 0.025%, or one in 4,000. That’s not so great odds that you’d expect them to just happen to pop up wherever we care to look, is it?
Time is also an important factor to consider. If we compressed the age of the universe to 24 hours to make things more relatable, that would mean human beings have been around for almost four seconds, and our knowledge of radio dates back to all of 1/1000th of a second ago. So if you put things in that perspective, it’s really not that strange that nobody has contacted us yet.
The trouble with your theory, Telperion, is that while the universe may be enormous, aliens would spread. Even the vast differences between galaxies are probably crossable eventually, with some kind of self-repairing spacecraft the size of a planet going at least 1/10 the speed of light. And they would spread exponentially, spreading at probably a net rate of 1/20 the speed of light in a massive sphere from their starting point like an explosion.
Unless we’re totally wrong about the nature of life or unless interstellar travel is totally impossible. Which would be an interesting finding in itself.
I don’t think you understand the physics. Galaxies aren’t fixed points in the universe, and indeed many of them are moving away from us at speeds approaching the speed of light. Reaching them may in fact never become possible. Even interstellar travel would take longer than the span of all of recorded history with the best engines we can feasibly create, and the first man-made object has yet to even make it out of our own solar system. It’s just not so simple as you want to make it out to be.
Sure, you aren’t going to catch one going relativistic speeds. Your “best engines we can feasibly create” argument doesn’t hold any water, we know damn well how to make betterengines, we are just not willing to try yet.
Also, a realistic interstellar spacecraft would probably ride a stream of small iron pellets launched from a relativistic superconducting quench gun. It would ride the pellet stream until it has reached cruising velocity. It would be mostly stored antimatter, stored by fusing anti-hydrogen all the way up until you have something that is stable and storable. The vehicle would use nanoscale manufacturing and thus be capable of reconstructing itself in flight, able to build any component that is part of itself that is has the raw materials for. So it would tear down it’s pellet beam receiver magnet train and replace it with a matter-antimatter rocket engine, which it would use during the deceleration phase of the journey. It might collect interstellar hydrogen using a ramscoop so it only has to carry the antimatter, not the matter.
If none of this works, plain old fusion works, you just have to be willing to haul about 99% fuel.
And if that doesn’t work, there are still various clever ways to at least hit 2% C or so. Either way, the only thing necessary is :
- You need a way for the explorers on the ship to live the entire journey, so they (and not some far off descendents) experience the reward of a new star system
- You need a way to repair the ship in flight as components age and fail, and a way to reconstruct civilization at the other end, bootstrapping your way back up to a civilization capable of launching more rockets.
As far as I know, know physics says we can do all this.
Indeed. And at that speed, it would take centuries to reach the nearest possible star. You might note that the vast majority of stars are much, much further away than that.
Yes but the argument is, if we launch a spacecraft tomorrow at 2% C, it arrives at alpha centauri in a mere 200 years. The galaxy has a radius of only 100k lightyears, so it’s going to take just 5 million years to cross the galaxy.
So, ok, we launch a spacecraft at 2% C. 200 years later, it arrives. It spends 200 years bootstrapping from a mini-van sized seed payload to a full technological civilization. (think self replicating robots, not humans who take 30 years per generation. The robots are not dumb, they carry onboard computers that emulate human minds or are equal or better than human intelligence in every way some other way). The new civilization launches another couple rockets.
Fast forward a mere 10 million years, and the whole galaxy is occupied. This happens much faster if the self replicating robots are more efficient about spreading, and can hit 10% or 50% or even 90% of the speed of light during the transit phases. Technically, the “pellet beam + antimatter brake” method I described could do 90%, although this assumes you can survive the interstellar dust impacts at that speed, that you can fuse anti-hydrogen to safer to carry elements, and you are willing to build a big enough rocket.
With faster, but still reasonable assumptions it takes 500k years to occupy the entire galaxy.
What is the motivation for us to build these self-replicating robots? Over the timescales and numbers of generations you’re talking about, they would change dramatically under Darwinian selection. Those who turned all the matter they encountered into more replicators would be favoured. Sounds like a good way to destroy the galaxy.
“Just” five million years is almost twice as long as humanity has even existed. We may have evolved to something else by that point, and may not even have need of a physical body that far off into the future. The whole eating and breathing thing is just a way to convert solar energy to chemical energy, but it’s far from the only way.