You’re missing the point of Fermi’s logic entirely. You’re writing as if there could ONLY be isolationist extraterrestrial civilizations, which is complete nonsense. All it would take is ONE advanced colonizing ET civilization out of billions to validate Fermi’s paradox. And you’ve got to admit ONE is possible.
Sorry, the probability of ETs remains trivially small.
What would be the point of making the probes undetectable? Come now! All it would take is ONE advanced colonizing ET civilization who made detectable probes (in the form of self-assembling von Neumann machines), and your entire thesis is shot to hell. And you must admit there could have been ONE.
Fermi’s logic can’t be overcome so easily. There probably aren’t any ETs out there, hard as that is for me to accept.
Surely ONE out of the potential billions would!
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How would that prevent ETs from contacting us, or at least of us learning of their existence? Be practical, please.
There’s a very funny short story about our first communications from an alien race being religious propaganda:
From The Word to Space, by Winston P. Sanders.
The answer has already been mentioned; other intelligent, space-faring species in our vicinity probably don’t exist, and even if they did, the immense distances between stars combined with the galactic speed limit make practical travel to other worlds impossible. ET may be out there, but we’ll never know.
But a very small galaxy! Your math, while possibly valid, simply doesn’t address Fermi’s paradox within the realm of the Milky Way. Remember, all it would take is ONE!
And we haven’t seen any sign of them or their robots. Ergo, they probably don’t exist in this galaxy. Universe-wide, I have no opinion.
It would take only ONE success over the course of several billion years and untold billions of civilizations. The odds are just about dead on that they’d have made themselves known if they existed.
Thanks for what I consider the post with the clearest thinking on this topic I’ve read so far. Nicely written, too.
However, as Fermi made clear, such probability estimates are really moot. As you appear to recognize, it would take only ONE to put ET right on our front door. And since ONE is the least we should expect, since we haven’t seen that one, single ET, we’re forced to accept that there probably aren’t any at all out there.
So maybe we’re the first. We’re the first planet to develop sentience and culture, and we’ll be the first to reach the stars. And millions of years from now, the future races of the galaxy will look at the remains of our works with wonder and awe.
It seems far more likely that semi-violent species such as our own would expand into space; the driving psychological force being to get “our” group, the Spizcans, at least a planet away from those damn, dirty Gorlocks.
In any event, at least one of those ET civilizations would escape self-annihilation and stagnation, leaving Fermi’s paradox in full effect.
Right, the restraints of physics. And I don’t think the astrophysicists hypothesizing wormholes and bends in space-time are going to come up with anything that doesn’t involve something physically impossible to create.
Given that, it always amazes me to see these kinds of threads grow and grow. It is like the “religion gene”, only modernized for aliens.
All it would take is ONE far-traveling civilization out of billions that could communicate with us and wanted to do so. ONE is so small a number that no calculation of odds can dismiss it. Fermi stands.
But there’s NONE we’ve never said “Hi” to. At least to the best of our knowledge. If there were, anthropologists would flock there in droves. And surely one of them would say “Hi”.
Given infinite time, nothing is “impossible”. By “highly unlikely” I mean, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Frankly, I doubt humans will exist as a species by the time our signals can even possibly maybe be heard by someone potentially advanced enough to happen to be listening, and only then if their rabbit-ear antennas have tin foil wrapped around them. And even then, their reply wouldn’t be heard until they were extinct, too.
It just isn’t scientifically sound reasoning. It is irrational.
You clearly don’t understand the premises of Fermi’s paradox.
By the way, if you read my previous posts you should be able to tell that I’m hardly supporting the ET hypothesis, but there’s nothing irrational or unsound about the possibility of ETs. You are mistaken about that.
Probably because I’m a humanities person and don’t care about it.
No, I’m sure life, and probably intelligent life, and likely life more intelligetnt than ours, exists or has existed or will exist.
However, this thread is about an inter-galactic community not contacting us. The article in the OP is posted as “ET Visitors: Scientists See High Likelihood.” I am merely pointing out that the likelihood of a ET visitor is asininely stupid and, as I said, highly unlikely, and the continued fantacies by people with otherwise sound minds are just stupid.
Actually, it’s my favorite scene from that movie. That speech goes on for more than 3 minutes, and it’s impossible to take seriously. But people taking the subject seriously is indeed rather… exasperating.
You seem to think that there could be only several billions or zero ET intelligent species.
Your argument (that at least one ET civilization would have spread all over the galaxy) would only be valid against someone arguing that there’s a lot of alien intelligent species in our galaxy.
But let’s assume there has been only a dozen, for instance. Then, why would we assume that one of them would necessarily have been interested in colonizing the galaxy? They could not have been interested in exploring it, not have felt any need to do so (what the point of colonizing the galaxy, exactly?), they could have only sent probes taht we can’t detect/ didn’t have the time to detect given the very short time elapsed since we entered in the realm of technology, they could (very probably would) use technologies to study the galaxy that we’re unaware of, the earth could be too long away/ isolated for it being worth the time needed to probe it, or not a suitable planet for them, etc, etc, etc…
Fermi paradox only shows that intelligent life similar to ours (same kind of behavior/motives), and long lived can’t be commonplace in our galaxy.
It isn’t as strong an argument as you make it to be.
I understand that you’re using “ONE” rhetorically, but I don’t see why this position is valid.
It assumes that this communication hasn’t already taken place - we would only have been able to recognize it in the last hundred years or so, if that. It assumes that Earth would for some reason be high on the priority list for any great intelligence to make contact with - when we humans still haven’t got around to exploring some of the more hostile parts of our own planet (deep ocean floor, beneath the ice caps).
on preview - what he (Clairobscur) said
Assuming that some absolute law of the Universe doesn’t make ET communication impossible, the likelihood would be very much time dependent. Agreed that the likelihood of “intelligent” ET contact tomorrow is infinitesimal based on current info, but since our current knowledge of the universe is also recent and infinitesimal, depending on how long we last, things could certainly change.
Accepting Fermi’s paradox requires us to accept two somewhat difficult propositions :
“The end of history” that everything which happens has already happened.
'The exception" : If you accept that human life is the result of the processes of the Universe, it seems irrational to believe that similar events haven’t taken place elsewhere, including other technology creating life-forms (or “non-life-forms”).
