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The Square Kilometer Array
EyesWideOpen writes "A very ambitious project to build the world's largest radio telescope, named the Square Kilometer Array or SKA, is in its early design stages. As its name suggests the SKA will be one square kilometer in size if it gets built. The SKA consortium (consisting of Cal Tech, Cornell, SETI, the Max Planck Institute and Beijing Astronomical Observatory to name a few) hopes to build the telescope by 2010. "If they succeed the SKA will be so big and precise it will jump the world's current best, the American Very Large Array in New Mexico, by a factor of 100, both in sensitivity and resolution." It's interesting to note that the project is based on technology that will only exist in three, five or seven years -- to account for data rates of tens to hundreds of terabytes per second and storage in the petabytes -- so they're counting on Moore's law to hold true."
Sure, you can come up with as many scenerios on why someone wouldn't do it as you want.
I think this is the part that I'm uncomfortable with - the argument seems to rest on the idea that if someone doesn't do it the way we think they should, then they probably don't exist. I accept provisionally that with a "reasonable degree of certainty" we see no evidence that they have ever been here, and thus must assume that either (a) they don't exist, as per the paradox, or (b) something is wrong with the model under which a paradox arises.
You can make up all kinds of conspiracy scenerios
I recognize that my argument treads dangerously close to loony ground. For the record let me state that I'm no UFO nut. All the same, the detritus of tinfoil hats and Von Daniken spoor all around us should not dissuade us from having a look around the territory. We cannot currently say anything conclusive about the frequency of extraterrestrial civilizations even nearby to our own solar system - we don't have the technology. The only thing we can eliminate with certainty is the presence of any nearby high-power directed beacons. Once we have the technology to detect earth-level RF from other solar systems, then we'll be able to say that we are not surrounded by civilizations. Until then, the Fermi Paradox must rest upon the absence of evidence for visitation within our own solar system.
I accept the conclusions of the paradox, but only provisionally. We are still speculating in a sea of unknowns, and I'm uncomfortable with charting out a single string of minimal-assumption hypotheses and then taking the results with anything but a grain of salt.
FWIW, my own personal suspicion is that technological life is incredibly rare, but that simple, bacterial-level life might be common. This is just based upon the one piece of evidence we have - the history of life on Earth. It's only a single data point, but all the same it is an absolute and undeniable example of life evolving in a solar system. Over 4.5 billion years of Earth's history, nearly 3 billion of those were spent as a stable bacterial world. In all that time, only one successfull association of bacteria managed to develop the information capacity of eucaryotic life. That's really bad odds.