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Aliens and the Fermi Paradox
First time accepted submitter sayhem (1842674) writes Various explanations for why we don't see aliens have been proposed—perhaps interstellar travel is impossible or maybe civilizations are always self-destructive. But with every new discovery of a potentially habitable planet, the Fermi Paradox becomes increasingly mysterious. There could be hundreds of millions of potentially habitable worlds in the Milky Way alone. This impression is only reinforced by the recent discovery of a "Mega-Earth," a rocky planet 17 times more massive than the Earth but with only a thin atmosphere. Previously, it was thought that worlds this large would hold onto an atmosphere so thick that their surfaces would experience uninhabitable temperatures and pressures. But if this isn't true, there is a whole new category of potentially habitable real estate in the cosmos.
At a certain point that starts looking like an attractive option. If NASA announced that they've managed to create a warp bubble, no matter how small, then I'd say the low hanging fruit is that aliens are in contact with certain elements of humanity and that this isn't widely known because a huge percentage of the world would freak the fuck out.
At Los Alamos, right around the time of the Fermi Paradox, everyone was agog at the green fireball phenomenon. One of the greatest collections of scientists ever assembled were pretty evenly split on the subject. Some though the the green balls of fire flying through the sky and changing direction as if being intelligently guided were some kind of secret earthly craft, while many other were certain they were extraterrestrial in origin. No one doubted they were real, however, and no one thought they were natural.
You don't really hear about this, but it's part of what started Fermi along the way towards his paradox.
As for the usual "OMG, nobody could keep that secret!" meme. Even if someone had 100% proof of alien encounters, the signal to noise ratio is assumed to be no signal and all noise. Someone could have been shouting the truth from the rooftops for forty years and nobody would care because they'd be lost in the din of people seeing little green men and anal probes.
Between "every civilization eventually kills itself" and a high level conspiracy to keep the world from shitting their pants at alien life, I'll pick the conspiracy. The fact that half of humanity isn't really ready to stop killing one another over five thousand year old superhero stories is kind of telling. Hell, half of humanity is confused by shoes.
All stars and stellar generations are not the same. As the Universe ages, every generation of supernovae introduces more metals (which in astro means 'anything except hydrogen and helium') into the galactic medium. Stars significantly older than our sun are unlikely to have had enough metals to form lots of rocky planets. Or if they did, any intelligent life there would find many of the metals that we consider fairly rare to be virtually nonexistent.
Conversely, in the far future when a large fraction of the ISM is heavier elements, the freak exception will the formation of rocky worlds small enough that the inhabitants on their surface can escape into space at all...
Well, as has been pointed out before, just because life appears to stem from one thing, doesn't mean there wasn't a "Second Genesis" (or multitudes of them, even happening today). However, those other lifeforms have to compete for the same resources as better adapted ones (per natural selection). And then there are things that are "arguably life" that seem awfully close to life and awfully orthogonal to the existing tree, like viruses.
But besides that, what amazes me is that we are not only the most intelligent life on earth (for some values of intelligence), but as far as we can tell, the most intelligent life to have ever developed on earth.
This seems odd, given that there are so many other intelligent life (but nowhere near our level) like cetaceans, some birds (which are descended from Dinos, which had a longer time to evolve in interesting forms- not like early, ratlike mammals, to boot), other primates, some species of octopuses, and I am sure I can think of more examples.
Maybe the trick is having a big brain and a body plan that is flexible enough to do many things, starting with a high metabolism. I would think that a therapod with human intelligence levels would have an awfully hard time building spaceships.
And the brain consumes a lot of energy, which is why human muscles are relatively weak and energy efficient (also for endurance).
In that sense, it is my opinion that life is probably common, but intelligent life is rare, maybe even extraordinary, and probably not inevitable for a planet or system.
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