Well, if they’re looking for life, Earth has been farting suspicious amounts of oxygen for a couple billion years. Waiting for TV signals seems stupid. It could take a thousands of years for the signal to get anywhere and many many thousands of years for them to get here and who knows what’s waiting for them when they get here? I’m guessing in thousands of years we’ll be capable of defending ourselves, if that’s the sort of galaxy we live in.
Against an antagonist who is a thousand years more advanced than us and populates multiple planets? Seems about as likely as a 10th century Eskimo village defending themselves from a 2016 US army battalion.
Fermi’s Paradox does not apply to us because we have unambiguous evidence of our own existence. It only applies to beings whose existence is unsupported by any evidence, when evidence ought to be abundant.
As for the rest of your post you might be interested to know that the SETI Institute itself completely and vehemently disagrees with you:
Fermi Paradox: Could we be alone in our part of the galaxy, or more dramatic still, could we be the only technological society in the universe?
(from link):
So: professional SETI specialists take Fermi seriously, but have apparently put no dent worth mentioning in his argument. If they can’t do it then you would do well to give up and try your luck against some other titan of the history of science, because Fermi has you soundly beaten.
If you had light-speed travel, you would turn into light. Which is gonna be a job to clean up, I can tell you that 
It’s just not feasible on any practical level.
Even 5% of the speed of light would be a mind boggling achievement to reach, one that would require levels of magitek, magic materials and energy generation schemes we can’t even fathom.
And that data would come back home 10 years later, and no concrete action could be taken upon that data for at least another 100. Garbage. We can’t plan that far ahead. Hell, we can’t plan 5 years from now.
Sure, but at that point it becomes all pointless speculation. I was answering the question from our own point of view, and within a timeframe that can be measured in generations. It’s quite possible there is a species out there that lives for untold aeons, lives on a migrant fleet and has already colonized or consumed hundreds of thousands of worlds we can’t even see from here (Tyranids, anyone ?).
What difference does it make ?
If we are prepared to accept civilisations that have colonised hundreds of thousands of worlds, then we need to ba able to find reasons why this colonisation hav not extended to every system in the galaxy. There are lots of possible reasons why such an expansive civilisation might not expand to colonise every world, but we don’t know which one is the real answer. And of course we don’t even know if expansive civilisations exist in the first place.
This is the heart of the paradox; the question can be stated simply, but we don’t know which of a myriad answers is the correct one. Or even if there is only one answer. But if the reason they are not here turns out to be an existential threat to our own civilisation then it is worth considering.
It is a fact that Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen are relatively common in our galaxy. These elements combined with the single most common element, Hydrogen, produce methane, water, and ammonia. It looks like the only critical factor is that this commonplace water needs to be in it’s liquid state, then life will spring forth with near certainty.
Based on this assumption, and it is an assumption is every way, it would logically follow that we should be finding life out there. The basic building blocks are common, we have time in great abundance, a sun that is average in every way, there’s no reason we shouldn’t find life thriving everyplace we look.
Thus the Fermi Paradox, “Where is everybody?”
Of course, there may well be other critical factors required and we’ll not even begin to understand what they are until we actually do find life out there. The search continues …
Well, they could be 10k years more advanced, but assuming FTL is impossible for everybody, it could take 1,000s of years for them to spot our communications, and easily much more than that for them to send anything here. We could easily have reached our own “tech singularity” by that time so would they really be able to do anything to us at that point? Anyway, it just seems if their goal was to wipe out life, the Earth has been showing signs of life for a couple billion years so they must be waiting for signals and that seems wasteful. Sort of closing the barn doors after the horses have left (or developed their own hyper-level of tech).
Nelson Pike: Cool quotes from SETI! Thanks!
Alas, I would have to disagree (mildly) with one thing in that quote: yes, ten million years is a very short time in the history of the galaxy…but it is a very long time in the history of individual species. Humanity has not existed for a tenth that time, and rocketry-competent humanity not for one one-hundred-thousandth of that time.
The longevity of civilizations is one of the scariest terms in the Drake Equation. We have no way to know if a technological/industrial civilization is actually sustainable or not. There are reasons to hope it is, but it is far from certain.
Entire civilizations might rise…and vanish…in the short time it takes our rocket to make the journey to the nearest extra-solar life-sustaining planets.
Isn’t that a lot like asking why we are sending probes to Pluto when no concrete action can be taken on that data? Or probes sent to Mars looking for life that may be a billion years extinct?
Any information about an extra-solar system would be of enormous theoretical value. There’s only so many planet-formation or life-origination simulations you can run against our sample size of 1. Having even three or four detailed extra-solar surveys would be pure gold to certain scientists.
You can argue that there’s not much practical application for theories of solar system formation and I wouldn’t disagree. It’s hardly useful for building the better mouse trap, but we’re still spending a lot of time and money studying that issue. Humans are just incurably curious, and I think a similar level of curiosity would drive most intelligent species.
Suspicious amounts of oxygen may correlate to a high probability of life, but it doesn’t necessarily correlate to a high probability of intelligent life. If the aliens got a load of Fred Mertz however, and figured a significant % of Earthlings looked and acted (“aw, shuddup, Ethel!”) like him, they may be motivated to exterminate us as gesture of kindness to the universe to prevent Mertz’s from spreading out and populating the galaxy and beyond.
Apparently, our early radio signals have traveled ~200 light years from earth thus far. According to this link, ~250,000 stars reside within 250 light years of us. There well could be a super-intelligent civilization or two lurking within earshot of our signals. And, if as I posited earlier, an advanced civilization may want to, and be capable of, cloaking it’s existence to prying eyes/ears, we’d be oblivious to them. A ~200+ light year alien drone sortie could be a Sunday drive in the park for a super-intelligent civilization. Who knows?
Do I think this is a likely scenario? No. But, it’s possible. The inverse square law degrades signal strength and despite wishful dreaming of FTL travel via wormholes and whatnot, I don’t believe anything approaching c is possible for any type of non-light matter. But, maybe ~50% c is achievable—and that could potentially put us at risk.
Solution: we need to start broadcasting photos of me (wearing my form-fitting boxer-briefs) into outer space. I’ll sacrifice myself to the wanton desires of alien space-chicks in order to protect mankind from planetary annihilation. You’re welcome.
The *Eskimos *would no doubt recruit polar bears and use their 100+ types of snow to level the playing field against the U.S. battalion.
YVW- glad you are enjoying the site.
Wiki indicates that before the impact of humans the average mammal species life expectancy was about 1 million years. (The longest species survival lifetime is thought to be some plankton species which lasted 13 million years)
However, IMO it is reasonable to suppose that our phenomenal intelligence may allow us to overcome even such imposing challenges as our homicidal mass psychology, and our Y chromosone degradation, thus sustaining the *h. sapiens * lifetime indefinitely.
As for the Drake equation it and not Fermi is the one I have trouble with, mainly because of the number of variables whose value we cannot in principle know of without a sample size of God knows what, randomly dawn from the galaxy, about ?half? of which is ?permanently? blocked from our view by the galactic center.
Your comments are correct. Your question’s answer is No.
It may be good to distinguish original life, and life-like organisms developed by such life, e.g. robots. One might be able to imagine the latter based on photon beams are something, but original life — life that evolves from the primordial non-life — almost certainly derives from specific complex molecules, e.g. DNA.
This fact was made clear to me by Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? (Re-reading that short book just now, I can’t really recommend it however — it may be tedious and obvious.)
True, but for them to wait until they find a radio signal doesn’t seem like a good idea if they’re afraid of other intelligent life. By the time they detect it, it could take them many thousands of years to get here and do anything about us. Our AIs and other technologies could be godlike by then. Just seems like waiting until you detect the signals it could well be too late if we do turn out to be aggressively expansive.
So, I’m not too worried about what they’re up to because they’ve had a couple billion years to find us and wipe us out and they haven’t, and I’m not that worried about them picking up our radio signals because that doesn’t seem like a good strategy if you have ill intent.
I’d never heard of Y chromosome degradation. As a male, I find the concept worrying! 
What’s happening to us?
I like the Drake Equation, but, yeah, a lot of the terms are unknown. To my mind, the D.E. is tautological: it’s self-evidently true. It’s just vague, because of the unknown terms.
It’s sort of like saying F = ma, where we know m, but don’t have a clue what a is. The equation is true…it just doesn’t help us a whole lot!
The concept of Y chromosome degradation is not universally accepted:
I admire the man as much as the next Chicagoan, but could Fermi simply be wrong?
Not that I think he is. I just think we are thinking on time scales that are simply too small. But why assume he is right?
He wasn’t right or wrong, because he wasn’t making a factual claim. He was simply asking a question to stimulate our thinking about the subject. There are many potential answers tomthe Fermi Paradox.
Many contributors to this thread have tried to go beyond mere assumption.
Expert astrophysical consensus, including that of SETI proponent researchers, appears to be that Fermi’s argument is a good one.
See quotation and link in reply #63.
My information came from the book Adam’s Curse by Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes. I have not read the relevant chapters for a while, I’ll take another look.
Wiki is often very helpful, and I have enjoyed it on a near-daily basis ever since I got wired years ago. However, sometimes it prints nonsense, and the first sentence of its section on Y chromosone degeneration is really off the deep end:
*By one estimate, the human Y chromosome has lost 1,393 of its 1,438 original genes over the course of its existence, and linear extrapolation of this 1,393-gene loss over 300 million years gives a rate of genetic loss of 4.6 genes per million years. *
The human Y-chromosone is not any 300 million years old, (the human species in less than 300 thousand years old, isn’t it?) and when one’s introduction is that badly falsified then everything that follows should be rewritten, preferably by different author.
Now MIT I’ll pay attention to:
THEORY OF THE “ROTTING” Y CHROMOSOME DEALT A FATAL BLOW
…even if they repeat the part about the 300-million year old Y-chromosone, which they need to explain a lot better than they do. I caught that 300 mya was the time of the first appearance of the Y-chromosone, any Y chromosone, presumably ancestral to all species’ Y chromosones, but to allude to it as the human Y chromosone must involve some kind of abstruseness of technical expression.
It’s 150am here, and I am not up to a careful reading. Will get to it later.