What's your favoured explanation for the Fermi paradox?

I don’t know. He was a really jokey guy, and he didn’t seem jokey about this. It was an odd moment. Like I said, I don’t know if I believe that, but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility, either. I probably wouldn’t even consider it, but I’m stubbornly optimistic about everything, including benevolent aliens. :slight_smile:

Do ants know that humans exist? They can sense our presence, but do they connect the shade that falls on their anthills with living, sentient creatures? Or is our shadow just another inexplicable natural wonder to them?

My belief is that the estimates are just plain wrong (or have enormous error bars). As a scientist, I would be making adjustments to my assumptions so the theory matches the facts, not vice versa.

I’m basically for the second option, in the following form:

The Universe is really, really big. No, bigger than that. And unfortunately, the laws of physics are, well, the laws of physics. So: No faster than light travel, which makes anyone getting here extremely unlikely. And signals tend to degrade rather quickly, especially when not actually aimed at us. So they just fade back into the background radiation. There you have it.

? Which of the proposed theories do you think does not match the facts?

What I am saying is that billions of dollars and a probe sent to Jupiter is equivalent to jumping in a car and driving 100miles to look for the other band of survivors on a galactic scale. Our own galaxy is so immense the chances of finding another intelligent species is essentially nil, too far apart in both space and time too.

I believe in the long run we are fucked. We’ll either do ourselves in or be taken out by a gamma ray burst or devastating asteroid strike well before we develop the ability to support our species without the Earth.

Ants are an evolved species of insects, but compared to humans they are boring as hell. We would likely be the same to aliens. Chances are if there is intelligent alien life then there is a lot more life in the universe that isn’t intelligent. A lot of microbes as well as some plants and animals. A species that can travel across dimensions or faster than light is going to have a lot of different forms of life to look at outside of earth.

So just as we feel no desire or urge to make first contact with an ant colony I don’t see why an advanced species would want to contact us. We have nothing they want. They have their own raw materials, their knowledge is vastly superior to ours, they have their own lands, etc.

People have claimed to contact aliens, but there are issues with that. What I don’t get about alien abduction stories is why do the stories get revealed under hypnosis? If aliens are even 200 years more advanced than us (unlikely, they would probably be endless eons ahead of us technologically) then they should be able to totally wipe out memories so nothing comes up under hypnosis.

also how does the interbreeding work? Aliens aren’t going to have DNA. Not only that, they aren’t going to have the same amino acids we do I’m sure. So there is no possibility of interbreeding unless the aliens understand biochemistry down to a fine science where they can translate their cell biology into our cell biology and back again. if they did, they wouldn’t need to conduct physical experiments and could do it all theoretical one would assume.