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Fewer Than 10 ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy?
Al writes "The Fermi Paradox focuses on the existence of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. If these civilizations are out there — and many analyses suggest the galaxy should be teeming with life — why haven't we seen them? Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain investigate another angle by considering the speed at which a sufficiently advanced civilization could colonize the galaxy. Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years, which may explain ET's absence. Cotta and Morales study how automated probes sent ahead of the colonization could explore the galaxy. If these probes left evidence of a visit that lasts for 100 million years, then there can be no more than about 10 civilizations out there."
Fewer Than 10 ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy?
All this is assuming that we would know immediately if there were a 50-100 million year old alien probe in our solar system's backyard. Stack that on top of all the non-empirical data based percentages that go into the Fermi paradox and ...
*puts on Twilight Zone music*
Human beings are the alien probe!
And man, we had better start compiling that report that's due when Quetzalcoatl/Jesus/Osiris/Thoth/Viracocha get back here. He's gonna be pissed when he sees that we just threw a huge party and trashed the place instead of assessing the resources!
My work here is dung.
Sumary of the article: we pull numbers out of thin air and imagine stuff in consequence. I did a lot of that kind of "what if" as a kid with friends.
I wonder why should one consider a colonisation of the whole Galaxy? Isn't it a too damn big territory to defend - explore - colonize? Without talking about the astronomical (ha ha) amount of human (E.T.) resources it would take to launch such an enterprise!
We've known there to be at most 10 civilizations ever since Master of Orion. A typical scenario is more like 6 though.
We should start bumping into Vulcans in about 54 years... Zefram Cochrane should be born pretty soon... then we'll know.
Nice point in general, but worthless without estimating the chances of finding these probes. A 100 million year old probe would not necessarily be easy to find even if it wants to be found and landed on earth.
I remember reading an interesting book called "The Science of Star Wars" that discussed the real life issues with the technology and situations in the original trilogy. This covered everything from the theoretical sciences behind the technologies like lightsabers, blasters, and lightspeed to the possibilities of existence of other life out there. I haven't read this book in a very long time and I don't have access to it at the moment, but I seem to remember it indicating that the odds of finding another planet with water, breathable air, and the exact distance from a sun necessary to help life flourish were so extremely low as to be laughable.
I remember thinking even then how short-sighted that was and how arrogant it seemed.
I realize these things are supposed to be scientific so they use only what they know to be fact, however, I think when dealing with complete unknowns such as the type of life out there or what their technology level may be at, you have to start thinking outside the box and be a bit more imaganitive.
Who is to say, for example, what form other life will take? Would we even recognize it as life if we were standing right next to it? What about their technology? Who is to say that they haven't gotten past the lightspeed issues with relativity and energy required? Perhaps they have stealth technologies... would we even be able to detect them? Just because we don't know how to do it now, and just because our current science says it probably isn't possible, doesn't mean it can't be done.
We pretty much know what rocks and ice look like. If the aliens aren't spectacularly good at masquerading as rock and ice, we'll recognize them.
That's a great line from the lyrics of a Clutch song, and it's forced me to ask the question: "What would life be like today, if the moment we invented radio/television we started receiving 60yo broadcast transmissions from another planet?"
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
This assumes that said ET's operate only in the 3D realm. What about wormholes, space folding and other theoretical methods that our limited understanding of physics doesn't allow us to see? Quit being such a downer. If Tesla was still alive I'm sure we'd have commerce with these ET's. Cheers...
Why would thsee ET like civilizations would be any different in their evolutionary development than humans? If this is the case, than many intelligent species will most likely follow the path that we seem to be on. With varying religious factions/greed/war/and depletion of natural resources reaching a point where they kill themselves.
Maybe there was a civiliation considerably more advanced than us, but whose to say they didn't destroy themselves by electing leaders who entered into wars over natural resources?
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
I am curious as to what evidence these alien probes would leave if they don't land and stay on a planet. If they just fly around, collect data and phone it home we would never see them.
Even landing, unless they landed on Earth, our Moon or Mars, how would we see it? I'm not even certain our own probes can spot our own rovers on Mars. Lets say they did put a probe down on earth (like our mars rover) say recently, like 100,000,000 years ago; it could easily be hidden under a kilometer of dirt and rocks and never be found. Time, like space, is vast.
Most, no all, of this Fermi Paradox/Drake Equation nonsense is just that. Nonsense. It certainly isn't science, as anyone with a smidgen of education can see by the ten orders of magnitude that the various estimates for the probability of alien life span.
This study says fewer than 10. Well, I say more than 10,000. And who is to say I'm wrong? I can dress up my estimate with Polar charts, statistical studies and differential equations too if you like. However, none of my investigations will bring me, or anyone else any closer to the truth.
As time goes by and our promised moon bases fail to materialise, the concept of the Von-Neumann wave is looking increasingly ridiculous. The idea that 1950's technology can propagate a species across a galaxy is supposedly sound in theory(I doubt even that), but shaky in practice. The idea of automated probes is also pretty unlikely considering the snails pace at which AI research has progressed.
Science fiction is all very well, but it has no place in Science. You don't see scientists talking about fairies, or wizards, or goblins over the course of their work. So why should they talk about aliens and colonization waves, which are no less fantastic?
This type of fuzzy science seems to have become popular after the 1960/70's, Carl Sagan, and probably one too many LSD trips. I thought things like the Heaven's Gate and Scientology would discredit this unwise intrusion of fantasy into serious scientific work, but studies like this, and the unwillingness of many scientists to leave their sci-fi novels at home have taught me otherwise.
May the Maths Be with you!
A good summary. Especially since they assume because we sent out a "identifier" once, that it is logical that all other civ's would continuously do that, just in case things change, and some youngsters show up. Instead of 1) send probes, get the info you want (or trash your orbit with satellites and crap so you can't lunch anything else) and give up, staying in your own solar system.
Not to mention we only see stuff at the speed of light, if they only send stuff at 1/10 the speed of light. Anyone over a thousand light years away hasn't even seen any signs of life in our galaxy yet, let alone had a chance to respond in a manner that we will then be able to see for a few thousand more light years.
This assumes a sufficiently advanced civilization could survive itself for a sufficient span. Taking the only advanced civilizations we know into account - the human race - I don't see how its realistic to expect survival into the "millions of years" range.
I'd put forth that any civilization advanced enough to develop such technological advances, would kill itself long before such technology develops. Our current modus operandi is not sustainable millions of years out, and using the human race as a basis, I think it laughable to consider the possibility of survival for millions of years. The oldest human remains are what, about 160,000 years old? Might we be getting ahead of ourselves speaking about intelligent life colonizing the galaxy?
Crocodiles on the other hand - those bastards are believed to be around 200 million years old. They've exhibited a much better understanding for what it takes to survive long term (of course we're doing a pretty good job of killing them too - you can say people are bad at somethings, but everyone has to admit we're really good at killing other stuff). If crocs could somehow work space travel into their lifestyle, this could lead to something...
Overclockers
It's always seemed to me that the major hole in the Fermi paradox is the assumption that technologically advanced alien civilizations would be emitting signals we would recognize.
I mean it's kinda hubristic to assume they want to talk to us. After all we may study chimps but we don't go out of our way to show up in the middle of nowhere to say hello. That leaves the question of why we don't detect communication leakage, e.g., radio signals they use for communication. However, not only is it not obvious that they would use radio to communicate, or that we could recognize such signals, but it's not even obvious they would bother to colonize the galaxy or communicate between planets.
For example suppose that sufficiently advanced civilizations transform themselves into some form of 'computational' life. Such a civilization couldn't care less about planents or minerals. What would matter to them is processing power per unit volume. It would therefore make sense for such civilizations to seek out the regions with the highest energy density that would allow them to access the most processing power. Rather than racing around the galaxy in starships and living at the same crawlingly slow pace we do such civilizations might exist entirely in the high energy regions in neutron stars or around black holes. So why would we expect to meet them. Hell, even if they care about meeting aliens too the aliens they care about are probably the ones who already inhabit similar regions.
Even if we think it's reasonable to assume aliens are sending messages all over the galaxy the more efficiently such messages are encoded the harder it will be for us to identify them. The closer such transmissions approach the Shannon limit for the communications channel the harder they would be to distinguish from random noise (and we don't know enough to rule out a natural source). Also the more effective use they made of their communications equipment the less stray signal that would wash the earth, even if it was encoded in radio instead of neutrinos or something weird (some papers have suggested neutrinos would be a better long range communication method).
The point is that even if we take for granted that there a fucktons of advanced alien civilizations around it just doesn't follow that we should be able to detect them.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
...and we haven't been back since. Beyond the question of how long it would take a motivated civilization to expand throughout the galaxy, there's the question of "would they bother?". We don't seem to be bothering.
I don't remember the novel it came from, but one SF writer had a bunch of human explorers run across pretty, slowly shifting, crystaline patterns floating as thin films on the surfaces of otherwise sterile oceans in a chemically exotic environment. Human initial response was pretty much limited to 'Ooooh shiny!" After weeks of scanning the whole planet and crunching numbers, one of the ship's scientists announces there is a sophisticated civilization with billions of participants encoded in each crystal mat, and has to prepare a computer emulation translated into experiential modes the humans can better understand before anyone else will believe it.
Who is John Cabal?
2. War on. Radio silence.
3. Wrong physics. Outside the bow-shock of a sun, radio works a lot different than we thought.
4. Cheap FTL communication happens to be just around the corner.
5. They are life, but not-as-we-know it and don't know about radio. Examples: Dark Matter, Live on a sun, live on a black whole. Note all three of these things are more common (on a mass basis) than planets.
6. Powerful, rich, major religion/government objects to radio and shuns those that use it, trades freely with those that avoid it.
7. Radio is deadly poison to one of the major alien species.
8. Most races are born telepathic.
9. Radio turns out to to cause global warming. (OK, this one is a bit silly.)
10. Industrial processes moved off world act as a radio scrambler/jammer. Races still use radio within their world, but their signals are jammed by the intereference from say the cheap production of anti-matter scramble the signals.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Haven't you read the Bible? The stars and moon were created so that we can see at night, nothing more. Why would there be life on a bunch of night lights?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
-Calvin
Later incorporated into his novel Diaspora
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
A civilization needs to devote a lot of resources to space travel:
1) Energy
2) Metal and other materials
3) Human resources such as scientists and engineers
Usually, the whole point of exploring and colonizing other planets is to make up for a lack of resources, such as minerals. It's effectively a chicken-and-egg problem.
I'm sure once we run out of resources, we won't have enough left over to start exploring space.
This space left intentionally blank.
Visit Orion's Arm for an idea what populating the galaxy might be like.
http://www.orionsarm.com/
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Ok, so we eventualy invent our own 0.5c space drives and go ahead and try to leave our solar system at 0.5c ...
We run through the Kuiper Belt where we collide with a tiny pebble that is lazily orbiting our solar system
The relative velocity of a bullet, fired from a low velocity pistol, when it hits something is generally between 300meters/second and 600meters/second. Now imagine a bullet with a relative velocity of 150,000,000meters/second. The problem isnt the space drives.... its that the "vacuum of space" has shit in it.
"His name was James Damore."
One word: Moths!
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It's always seemed to me that the major hole in the Fermi paradox is the assumption that technologically advanced alien civilizations would be emitting signals we would recognize.
Absolutely right!
I've argued this for years...given exponential progress, the period of time an alien civilization would even be recognizable yet detectable at a distance can probably be measured in decades, centuries at the outside. It's possible to imagine all kinds of Ascendance Scenarios where a species transcends its biological (and perhaps physical) form altogether, whether it's becoming digital life living in the Virtual, transcendent life encoding itself into the basic fabric of space-time (and thereby perhaps doing an end run around the "death by entropy/expansions/big crunch" apacolypse...or not, if that space-time is smacked by the incoming brane of another universe on a collision course, but I digress...), or--arguably most likely--some form we'd have as much difficulty imagining as the victorians would our notion of digital life.
This galaxy alone could be teaming with life. If a civilization progresses from the industrial revolution to transcendence in, say, 400 Earth years on average (and from their first radio broadcast to transcendence in, say, 200 years), there could be many thousands of cultures out there right now, and over the course of the past 13 or so billion years, many millions in this galaxy alone, and none of them would ever be detectable by us during this phase of our existence. Indeed, few if any would ever meet one another during this phase of their existence ... perhaps as you surmise they might meet in a common post-transcendent medium, or perhaps not (there may be many more options for transcending this universe than there are species to transcend, making it very unlikely that any two civilizations would ever meet or recognize each other at any point during their evolution). Who knows? What we do know is there are plenty of ways for civilizations to thrive, and be commonplace, without them ever being able to detect, much less encounter, one another.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
We still haven't killed ourselves.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Otherwise, societies are too self-absorbed to dedicate those sort of resources to a goal that will have ZERO benefit to them or their descendants.
It sucks for scientific types, for sure, but the best way to get the masses emotionally committed to space flight and space exploration is through religion. There's no more historically proven way that motivates people to build and explore for future purposes than the prospect of being able to worship your lord and impose his law as your religious customs see fit to do so. In 1620, it wasn't a bunch of scientists on board the Mayflower, it was a bunch of religious fanatics. In my site I'm going to go all out religion for space exploration as a national priority and argue in this order:
a) The Lord gave us the vast resources of the Heavens to use.
b) The Earth is a crowd and dank cesspool of sin.
c) You can establish a more Godly society on another planet.
d) You can re-create the American Experiment the way the founding fathers intended.
This is my sig.
When thinking of whether we humans would be able to detect the arrival of an alien probe, we should all mediate on the parable of the G'Gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs:
... [t]he two opposing battle fleets decided to settle their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our galaxy, now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands of years the mighty starships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth - where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time.
bjourne points out: "They assume that alien civilizations would grow exponentially like humanity. To maintain exponential growth the civilization would inevitably have to colonize other planets, other solar systems and even other galaxies."
What they really assume is that the laws of physics apply broadly across the cosmos. Darwin and Malthus do the rest.
The real question is how hard it is to jump the gap from one world to the next. Science fiction authors assume this is not only possible but relatively easy, because otherwise they would have no story to write. Travel (of the few) within the solar system seems plausible. Travel (of the many) to neighboring stars is far beyond daunting.
Consider Malthusian growth: Our population today is 6.602 billion souls. The current growth rate is 1.167% per annum. (Numbers are a couple of years old - it doesn't change the result.) Do the math.
Today there were 210,000 more souls and 6000 tons more human flesh pressing inward on Mother Earth than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be 210,000 more. The day after - another 210,000. In six months that will be 211,000 per day - in a year, 212,000 per day, and so forth and so on. Less than a year from now there will be another 1.8 million tons of human flesh literally shouldering other species into extinction. That's not 1.8 million tons total - that's just the additional growth of skin and hair and sinew and good red meat locked up in your mama's Soylent Green recipe.
For space travel to matter in the solution of this problem, we have to build a fleet of ships capable of offloading 210,000 people - a new space fleet every day, year after year - forever. A space shuttle carries a crew of seven - so we need 30,000 space shuttles a day. (Of course, that only gets you to low Earth orbit.) Each year we would have to move at least that 1.8 million tons of human cold cuts - that's the equivalent of 18 Nimitz class aircraft carriers - to some other distant, unwelcoming world.
And then, of course, you've just shifted the horizon of the always looming catastrophe to a collection of planets rather than a single planet. Since this is a doubling issue, colonizing another planet - say, a terraformed Venus - just buys you an additional 60 years.
It's always seemed to me that the major hole in the Fermi paradox is the assumption that technologically advanced alien civilizations would be emitting signals we would recognize.
In common with authors the wrote the cited paper, and most commentators on the subject (and virtually everyone who claims to have a "resolution" for the Fermi Paradox), the above comment fails to understand the essence of the Fermi Paradox -- what actually makes it profoundly paradoxical.
The Fermi Paradox does not assume that "technologically advanced alien civilizations" (in general) "would be emitting signals we would recognize". The paradox lies in the fact that the Universe is a very big, and very old place and as far as we can tell none of them do (if they ever existed at all).
Are you proposing that there is some sort of the universal law of nature that decrees no civilization anywhere in the Universe will make detectable and recognizable signals of any kind, intentionally or unintentionally? After all it only takes one single ancient civilization anywhere to take a course of development that creates a detectable signal for any reason to overturn the Fermi Paradox.
Attempting to dismiss it by claiming that civilizations exist, but that no civilization ever makes human-detectable signals, begs the question (in one of the original and correct senses of the term): it attempts refutation by assuming an unsupported premise (in this case two of them) : 1) that they do exist, but and an arbitrary special universal law holds that prevents any from being detected.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Not laughable.
there are over 70 sextillion stars. If the chance are 1 in a trillion we would ahve a galaxy teaming with intelligent life; however, That's over the period of 13 billion years.
All evidence point to species becmoing ectinct sooner or later. so what are the odds of an intellegent species surviving to a point where they can send out probes?
Even if a civilization created a probe that is trying to be fouind, it would still be very, very, very hard to detect, assuming it gets close enough to be detected.
We've only been able to look for radio technology for less then 100 years, and only beena ctivly looking for non-terrestrial radio signals for about 30.
Imagine looking for your keys. This would be like the first nanosecond of your search. What are the odds you would find them that fast, even knowing they exist in your house?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Let alone evidence that would last a million years. A probe could have come through a thousand years ago, hung around taking pictures and measurements for a few years and moved on. We'd never know.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
For awhile I've believed any world people capable of distant space travel and other colonization would need as a prerequisite world peace, world order and one rule of law. First the marshaling of resources necessary would require near world wide cooperation and second, as is presently our case, prior to a world government, states knowledgeable enough to even consider such far ranging travel would most likely put their resources toward weaponizing near space as a response deterrent to their presumed enemies. Second the best and the brightest necessary to such an undertaking aren't going to be on hand in any one nation or coalition and will be the best and the brightest we as a species can muster. Large inter tribal structures are capable of bonding factious tribes and when such inter tribal structures offer benefits they can act as a deterrent to conflict. Inter planetary, let alone inter stellar travel are such magnanimous undertakings and can drive world peace and world law. It may be that any world that has achieved space travel technology able to colonize distant planets have in place laws that would make it highly problematic for them to contact waring tribes such as ourselves. Who would they contact? Would their choice of a tribe to contact cause conflict?
ideopath @ play
The only civilizations still surviving in our galaxy are extraordinarily powerful and consider humanity beneath notice. Which is a Good Thing, because when they notice you, it does not go well. Really, Miskatonic University is the only institution doing useful work in this area. Unfortunately they have trouble keeping research staff on.
One of the reasons why we might not see the galaxy as teeming with life is beacuse all the life out there might not be capable of generating advanced technology. One of the assumptions in the equations is that all live will evolve to the point of sentience and begin building transistors. Why would this be the case?
The dinosuars were doing pretty well as the dominant species for 100 million years without advanced technology, and if it were not for the KT event, they might have been the dominant species for another 100 million years. Evolution doesn't 'try' to evolve life to be smarter, just to be better. Big brains were a good move for us, but that may not be the case for every other life form.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
WE have forty year old tech that can take sensor reading to the edge of the solar system. It is just silly to think that a civilization with interstellar travel technology would not have equally impressive sensor tech. Our puny sensors can see interstellar distances. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that a sensor platform in deep space, created by an interstellar civilization would be orders of magnitude more sophisticated. So, If your sensors can read a newspaper on earth from a light year away, you really don't have to go all the way to earth to determine if it is interesting enough to send a "manned" mission. Therefore, if you only have to come within a light year of a planet to determine whether or not it is interesting and your version 1.0 probe is .10 LS capable then by sending out 1,000 probes, you can survey the entire galaxy in less than 1 million years assuming that you have no further advances in technology and your exploration goals do not change.
Fermi's Paradox came up in a dream once. The explanation, according to the dream, is that Earth is in quarantine. The powers that be in the Galaxy put a communications blocking bubble around the solar system of all new technological civilizations for 10,000 or 15,000 years. The point of the exercise is that new civilizations are like teenagers, dangerous and unaware of their power to wreak havoc. This is especially true of newcomers that discover inter stellar travel while not yet having complete control over their atomics. So they just wall us off until we either 1) destroy ourselves, or 2) grow out of our galactic adolescence.
The dream went on to explain why we see UFOs that don't communicate with us. They are outlaws breaking the quarantine. Humans, said the dream, have unique language abilities unknown elsewhere in the galaxy. A single human could write more and better code than teams of hundreds in the next-best software civilization. So the UFOs are from some of the shadier civilizations out there and they come to kidnap code slaves. They have to stay stealthy or they will get caught.
This was a real dream I had about 10 years ago. And yes, I was asleep at the time. The story is obviously full of holes, it was only a dream after all, but intriguing.
I know I'm just being techy, but you can't actually STUDY something until you have at least one example of it.
A lot of cosmological science and just about all exobiological science is completely made-up, maybe I'm just tired of "science news" that is 100% fictional.
Frankly, we have nearly zero knowledge of life in the rest of the universe - it's okay to speculate, just call it speculation.
Call it the blurker hypothesis. Think about it. The universe is maybe 14b years old. Our own planet is about 4b years old. For Earth to form, there had to be a giant dust cloud full of iron and other heavy elements, which can only have come from novae/supernovae. So at least one generation of stars had to form, burn out, explode, cool to ash, and then reform into new gravity wells to form this solar system. Since this one is about 4b years old, and can be expected to make it another 4b or so, then that leaves a tidy 10b years for a previous star cloud to seed our local region of space. Seems like just enough time. So we haven't seen other intelligent life yet because we are among the first ones to emerge from the ash...
We dont see life everywhere because we (life forms) get clever enough to release radioactivity into our life envelope, long before we get clever enough to have multiple robust life envelopes. Smart enough make weapons, not wise enough to stop using them. Or in the common parlance: Glen Beck.
1: God-like* alien intelligence is all around us and they're enjoying the show --or completely disinterested.
2: FTL or even near light speed travel is impossible and we're limited to contact with close neighbors.
3: We're the first technological species in the neighborhood (maybe life and/or intelligence is just incredibly unlikely).
-----
*They would have tech perhaps millions of years ahead of us
Ask me about my sig!
is that the number of planets that can host life forms is so low in number, that some sort of Terraforming technology would have to be made to make the Mars and Venus type planets more like Earth.
Right now we cannot even control the pollution on Earth that is making Earth less hospitable to current lifeforms.
If there is more advanced life in the universe, they'd have to find a solution to their own pollution as well as invent Terraforming technology. If they don't, eventually they will go extinct.
There is also a good chance that Earth is the most advanced life forms in our galaxy and if other life exists, it hasn't even invented radio devices yet so we can detect them, or they are too far away that radio waves from their planet has not reached Earth yet.
There is also another possibility that maybe life on other planets skipped radio if they are advanced enough and use some other way to communicate that we cannot detect, or they use radio and use an encryption that makes it look like natural random signals to less advanced life forms.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I don't think that Fermi's Paradox is all that paradoxical either. I just think he was closed-minded, unimaginative and perhaps a tad (or a whole lot) conceited. (Sorry, Fermi.) --But I still think you're making a rather large assumption.
We crossed oceans without first getting comfortable in our dangerous, leaky, rat-infested sail boats. Planets have wonderful, big, open spaces, wind and rain and snow, natural sunlight, natural fauna and geographic features which appear according to chaotic systems we don't have to think about or organize; they just happen! How awesome is that? I think living on a space platform, even a really nice one, would be a rather horrible way to exist by comparison.
I also happen to think that contact was made a long time ago, we are the cattle raised by those who plan to colonize and that all our major religions are direct works of population manipulation.
But then, I'm about as far from Fermi as Fermi is from me. Exactly that far, actually.
I just don't see any paradox.
-FL
Simple.
There is 100% no proof that there is life out there. Period.
Therefore the assumption is (for now!!!) that we are alone and that we need to take more care of this place.
to code or not to code, that is the question.
Lets suppose that we design a small craft with a forward cross section of 10m square. Lets further suppose that craft is traveling at 0.5c.
This craft sweeps a volume of space equivilent to 15 billion cubic meters / second.
Thats 9 quadrillion cubic meters / week.
The *nearest* star will be 8 years away, at 0.5c.
The chance of hitting such a small piece of rock approaches 100%
"His name was James Damore."