Gamma-ray Bursts May Explain Fermi's Paradox

An anonymous reader writes: A new study confirms the potential hazard of nearby gamma-ray bursts. It quantifies the probability of an event near Earth, and more generally in the Milky Way and other galaxies over time: "[Evolved] life as it exists on Earth could not take place in almost any galaxy that formed earlier than about five billion years after the Big Bang." This could explain the Fermi's paradox, or why we don't see billion-year-old civilizations all around us.

Comments

Not really.

[wierd_w]

This does not really resolve fermi's paradox. It just helps define fermi's paradox.

The human race has been in mostly the same state physiologically for more than 10,000 years-- That is to say, you could clone a person who lived 10,000 years ago, and never tell them their origins, and they would integrate into our society without problem.

Our civilization has been prevented from leaving the earth by our own silliness. Our big push out of a major duldrum of ignorance has been a bittersweet one; After the renaissance, we discovered that we were capable of much more than we had. We focused on that, and coined a now much maligned term: "Progress."

For the better part of the past 2 centuries, humans were focused on attaining such "Progress", and technological advancement grew at previously unprecedented speeds. We literally went from covered wagons and horses to nuclear power in 200 years.

It wasn't biology holding humans back from this rapid achievement-- It was attitude and social conventions. Things like warring over who's god has the biggest dick, or over who has the most money. (Things we STILL fight about to this day!) When there is a major social focus to improve, we have historically demonstrated the ability to do it.

If we can thus do this-- Go from horse drawn conveyances to nuclear energy in 200 years-- then there is very little reason to expect other potential civilizations from doing so as well, and perhaps not having spent quite as much time arguing over who's god has the mightiest member.

Yet, when we look up into the sky, we dont find any. We strain with our radio telescopes, and hear only the strange EM flux of gas giants, the hissing and popping of stars, and the screams of magnetars.

This finding does not settle Fermi's paradox. It just sets a slightly smaller boundry.

Re: Not really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Total bollocks.

Nuclear propulsion could easily lift hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of tonnes of cargo into space, and had been demonstrated at near full scale. See NERVA and Project Orion, both of which were so technically successful that congress canceled them as to avoid having to fund true space colonization and development.

Nuclear propulsion also has the potentially to travel at relativistic speeds, potentially allowing travel to near by stars within a human lifetime.

I quote, "The reference [Orion] design was to be constructed of steel using submarine-style construction with a crew of more than 200 and a vehicle takeoff weight of several thousand tons. This low-tech single-stage reference design would reach Mars and back in four weeks from the Earth's surface (compared to 12 months for NASA's current chemically powered reference mission). The same craft could visit Saturn's moons in a seven-month mission (compared to chemically powered missions of about nine years)." (Wikipedia)

It's not my fault that politicians have decided that space propulsion should not advance significantly beyond chemical power, effectively being stupidly big and advanced firecrackers.

This is not new technology, this was developed in the 50s and 60s. Has development continued, I have no doubt that we would have industrial space stations, reasonable interplanetary travel (as in weeks/months instead of years/decades), and man would currently be planning to launch a multimillion ton expedition from the asteroid belt to nearby stars with confirmed exoplanets. The only reason we don't take advantage of space resources, and zero gravity manufacturing is because it takes $20000+ per kilo to get a payload into orbit. Drop that to $500, and everything changes dramatically.

The problems with real space exploration are speed and payload mass limitations. Nuclear energy solved both of these problems decades ago.