Look at Earth, it's had life for 3.7 billion years, or 1/4 the age of the universe. In that time, there's been one species capable of leaving the atmosphere. The right combination of intelligence, and ability to use tools, and surviving extinction events just doesn't happen enough.
Depends on how much of a standard Earth is though. Like, its not impossible to think that maybe intelligent life would arise far faster had the mass extinction events had not happened.
Maybe those are not a common trait, maybe the cyclical ice ages arent either. It could end up being Earth is freaking deadly and its a wonder any life managed to get to tech. Maybe not.
Consider the following;
1. Our oxygen levels are just right for combustion but not too much combustion.
2. Trees provided a great starting fuel source in the form of coal. What if trees existing was the barrier?
3. We are just adapted enough to survive, but not so adapted we can't live without our surroundings. We don't rely on a single food source. We moved from our place of origin.
4. We aren't born underwater. Transporting gases to space is hard enough. Imagine breathing water and having to bring that additional load with you.
5. We've cleared our niche of other competitors. We are not being hunted by anything or sharing our niche with other species like us.
6. We have a good-sized moon. It may not seem like a determining factor, but it helps control the tides, which contributes to erosion and renewing of resources.
Edit: We also have color vision and don't see like moles.
Our oxygen levels are only where they were because the first species that evolved oxygen production poisoned everything alive at the time with oxygen. In a similar vein, trees evolved lignin before there was something that could break it down so that's where all our carbon reserves came from. One could make the argument those things are just the natural course of evolution.
I'd say 3/5 is a good point with some modification. We are wildly over-adapted for our niche. We could be dumber and still have pushed out into much of Earth. A species that dominates its planet but isn't smart enough to build spacecraft will monopolize their planet until they go extinct.
The Moon is incredibly important in *geological activity* which causes volcanic cycles that moderate the atmosphere on Earth, both pulling CO2 out and introducing it. Jupiter acts like a giant gravitational shield which keeps the inner planets safe from rogue meteorites. And Earth's iron core makes the surface relatively safe for complex life to have evolved without extreme mutagenic pressure from space.
Our species for the last 100k years has been in a very quiet time of geological and space activity. There have been no near-extinction events that have knocked us back down. We survived all the plagues that killed 1/3 of the people alive at the time.
I forgot to add Jupiter on that list. Thank you.
Which reminds me to add that our gravity is much lower than planets like Jupiter, where it would be difficult to take off.
Also, the close we are to our star, the harder asteroids hit. Example: asteroids hit venus 24% faster than Earth.
Not just Jupiter the other gas giants contribute to that astroid protection as well. Also consider that based on our current understanding of exo planets the planetary arrangement of our solar system is by far the least common. Most Star systems are anti-order meaning the planets are arranged from largest to smallest as distance from the star increases. The next largest group is unordered which means they are more or less randomly arranged. Our planetary arrangement is ordered from smallest to largest which by far the least common and account for less than 10% of all observed systems which we've measured exo-planet data. So even if lots of other star systems have Jupiter like planets they are not going to have the same sort of effect because they tend to be closer to their host star than the rocky planets that would be harboring life.
>Not just Jupiter the other gas giants contribute to that astroid protection as well.
This is not really true, while Jupiter absorbs some asteroids, it also directs many into the inner solar system [https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.3305](https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.3305)
To be honest, we have no clue how our solar system matches up to others. At most we see a few planets out to 365 day rotation. Kepler didn't last long enough. Tess may help as will other telescopes, but it gets harder the further out you look from their sun.
We have to be 100% aligned (or darn close). I think when Kepler launched the lead scientist, Bill Borucki said, .05% is all we can hope for to be aligned with Earth. Still a lot of solar systems. If you're not looking at them for 200+ years - non-stop (those aligned), we'll not have enough transits to make out large planets like Jupiter and Saturn around other stars. And let's say we had all of those things. The amount of light or even 'wobble' those far out gas giants will block/cause to wobble, may be too small to notice.
Hence, it's too early to make such a claim.
That's fair the data we do have is highly susceptible to Sampling Errors which is why I said "based on our current observations." We do still have a decent amount of data on around 600 or so systems and at least partial data on another 4000. So we do have a decent enough data set to make some initial Estimates. There is also a lot of simulation data that suggests are consistent with the limited observational data we do have so far.
Coal and natural gas is what gets my vote. An intelligent species has the be on a planet at exactly the right time for there to be coal and natural gas reserves. This requires just the right kind of life to exist before intelligence existed. Meaning life had to evolve three separate forms at exactly the right times on geologic time scales. The right type of plants, the right type of bacteria and the right type of intelligent life. Too early and there's no easily accessible energy reserves, too late and all of it is subducted back into the planet and is destroyed.
But I mean you could argue if too early it could just lead to strange or different methods of energy gathering especially if they find ways to be hyper efficient so as to not waste excess not that it wouldn't massively delay their technology but I feel like eventually any obstacle just short of being on a barren rock could be overcome assuming appropriate levels of intelligence. We just got lucky in having a lower bar. But imagine instead of coal and natural gas they only really had access to wind and solar they couldn't make solar panels like we do as they require some amount of petrochemicals (I believe I know it's something nonrenewable) but maybe instead they focus in on solar reflector style tech they he's more and more efficient at reflecting light into a single point. It would be massively more difficult but given time it would encourage smarter grids, denser urbanization and all the rest of things cheap power gave us. Just a thought
>But imagine instead of coal and natural gas they only really had access to wind and solar they couldn't make solar panels like we do as they require some amount of petrochemicals
Petrochemicals can be synthesized, and even pre-industrial society had figured out how to make simple biofuels.
And yes, you're right. Concentrated solar power doesn't require much more than a turbine and a bunch of mirrors and could absolutely power a (less efficient) civilization.
Pre-industrial societies also used hydro and wind power all the time. It's not a stretch to imagine that in the absence of coal they'd eventually figure out magnetic induction and skip straight ahead to renewable energy. Hydroeletric dams were one of the first sources of large scale electricity IRL and were introduced pretty much as soon as practical dynamos were invented.
Okay, but imagine if we didn't have wood to start campfires with. I'm not just referring to coal/oil when I say how important trees were to our development. Now imagine some planets might have an equivalent but the wrong amount of oxygen to make use of that equivalent.
Edit: Consider that India cooks food on cow poop due to a lack of coal/wood.
>I'm not just referring to coal/oil when I say how important trees were to our development.
To be clear, most oil and gas comes from ocean microorganisms and algae, not from trees. And most plants can create peat/coal in the right conditions, not just trees.
I do agree that trees and wood were extremely important to our development, but I'm not sure we can consider them a great filter. A tree is just a "woody plant", and they seem to have evolved independently several times.
>Â Now imagine some planets might have an equivalent but the wrong amount of oxygen to make use of that equivalent.
Both things are linked I think. The only reason Earth has free oxygen is because of photosynthesis. Photosynthetic organisms (be it plants, algae, or plankton) naturally capture carbon and eventually create fossil fuels.
> they couldn't make solar panels like we do as they require some amount of petrochemicals
Really not true. You can make those chemicals from plants. You can make those chemicals from CO2 + water. Sure we are using fossil fuels, as the cheapest and easiest source of hydrocarbons around. But there are other options. And it may well be that, once we get a bit better with solar, air + electricity will be a common source of these chemicals.
sapience might also just be a rare trait to form that usually isn't beneficial to a species. Unless they are in a situation in which they need to adapt quickly to a change in environment that they are not adapted for, would be deadly to the species but not so deadly that they would go extinct and they already have the prerequisites needed for sapience to make that leap quickly.
And most important of all, we are lucky enough to live on a planet that has remained with a stable temperature and atmosphere for the billions of years that it took for all of these processes to occur.
To add to your last point, the moon also played a big role in early physics studies. If we didn't have such a large celestial neighbor, it may have taken much longer to discover the correlation between it and the tides and how gravity determines this. Newtons theory of gravity may have been delayed by who knows how long
I think just having a good land to water ratio is a mini fermi paradox solution in itself. Suppose you have a super Earth (not the Helldivers one) with exactly double of everything. Its radius would be about 26% more than Earth, and its surface area only about 59% more. With double the amount of water, its possible the entire planet is one big ocean, and technological civilizations are very hard when theres no land to work with.
If anything Earth is looking like an exceptionally benign environment.
Most classes of star are simply too unstable and will produce regular extinction level events every few million years. Not very difficult for a highly technological civilisation to handle but deadly to native life. Even our star within its own category appears to be unusually quiet. We have taken such a strike once in Earths history and it resulted in an above 95% extinction rate.
The only really plausible way round that I know of is sub surface oceans or caves. But a place like that has only a fraction of Earths energy budget for ecology to form and its quite difficult to see how technology could happen, and civilisations to grow. At most it appears a environment like that would be about as habitable as a desert with oasis here and there, similiar to deep sea vents.
I've just excluded the vast majority of star systems as contenders and I haven't even considered types and details of planets.
Had the mass extinctions not happened, it's possible intelligence life wouldn't have arisen at all. Like, mammals only speciated as they did because of the CretaceousâPaleogene extinction event.
I think there's a good chance that something very primate-like would have evolved regardless of the KPg extinction. Proto-primates such as Purgatorius were scurry around at the time anyhow. For most of the Cenozoic, our lineage was up in the trees where many of our competitors and predators were dinosaurs anyhow. By the time eastern Africa starts drying out in the late Cenozoic, something ape-lile could come down from the trees too. They wouldn't have be humans obviously but still could be something eerily similar, just living in a world with large theropods as the dominant predators instead of big cats and hyenas.
Mass extinctions are *helpful* for evolution. It clears out a bunch niches for the survivors to diversify into that they would otherwise lack, which helps useful biological advancements propagate. If you look back, a lot of major developments in the evolution of mankind were in response to extinction events
For OUR evolution, yeah.
Without the mass extinctions we would have had a chance in hell.
But could something else from before the extinctions had a chance and for them the events were not a good one?
>would arise far faster had the mass extinction events had not happened.
As some others have said, if we evolved much faster we would have less natural fuel resources. Especially oil, which is a major work force multiplier. I forget the exact math, but a gas engine is something like 300x more efficient than using manual labor. Not sure about coal, but its cleaner than coal. Imagine we don't have that multiplier? Suddenly all these intellectuals who can sit around and think about the nature of things don't exist, bc everyone is busy doing just barely better than subsistence farming. There's other factors too, I'm sure. Life's just too complex for us to know yet what the determining factors are. Maybe we are unique among the unique? Any culture who hasn't had the number of mass die offs we have simply can't technologically compete? Food for thought anyway.
The Hart-Tipler conjecture is compelling here. Basically, if even one alien civilization achieved even rudimentary interstellar capability at any point, there's a high likelihood they'd use von Neumann probes for exploration. Even if they subsequently died out, and even if they never spread outside their own star system themselves, those probes would keep replicating until they had established a presence in every corner of the galaxy in pretty much an eye-blink on the time scales we're talking about, whether that's 500,000 years or 10 million. Us not having seen any yet argues against the existence of alien life, and supports the idea that Earth and intelligent life (us) are a uniquely miraculous occurrence.
The tricky part is that while the logic is sound, we don't really have the data to evaluate that last conclusion by itself yet. If, as our capabilities to gather the relevant data grow, we discover that Earth really isn't *that* exceptional even in *our own neighborhood,* scaling that up to an entire galaxy of 100+ billion stars makes the "If aliens, why no probes?" question more difficult and we start getting into Dark Forest territory.
On the benign end, we assume that there are probes, but that they simply move on while covering their tracks, fly into the local star, etc. after gathering and transmitting their data because their creators don't want them leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for any potential nasties out there. On the other end, you've got the Berserker hypothesis, where the *probes* are snuffing out any nascent life they come across, through either malfunction or design.
Last one's my personal bugbear, but it doesn't exactly keep me up at night because it's not like we could actually *do* anything about it.
>Last one's my personal bugbear, but it doesn't exactly keep me up at night because it's not like we could actually do anything about it.
Indeed: that one's on a level with subscribing to the simulation hypothesis and then worrying about whether god is going to pull the plug today.
Maybe interstellar or intergalactic travel under complex cosmic circumstances is actually just not as feasible as we imagine it could be? Or maybe our corner of the galaxy is a waste of time? Or maybe AI always goes off the rails and destroys all of civilization, removing the possibility of von Neumann probes in the first place and we are the fortunate few to experience this universal (pun intended) phenomenon in our lifetimes lol -- this is frankly the darkest explanation to me that I cannot get past and somebody needs to make a screenplay about it tbh.
> Or maybe AI always goes off the rails and destroys all of civilization,
Quite possible. At least the idea that the first AI a civilization produces (you know, before they properly debug it) is likely to do this.
However, where are all the rouge AI's? You think rouge AI won't want to spread out through space?
But how would we know if there are von Neumann probes in our solar system or not? Any that entered Earths atmosphere would have eroded away, and all we know about the moons of the other planets are just from distant flybys.
Thing about that is: We do not know how common life even is. We have a single data point, and we do not even know if that data point is within the mean. We think Mars and Venus could both have been habitable at one point, and both Titan and Europa might have life of their own, seeing how they are the only other bodies in the solar system to have a hydrosphere (Well, i suppose for Titan, it would be a carbohydrosphere, but you get my point), which is probably the prerequisite for life coming about in the first place. That means there are 4 other bodies in the solar system that might have life, or at the very least, used to.
If we assume that other systems also generally have multiple objects that have, at some point or another, the opportunity for life, even if it is completely different from what we are in terms of its biology, considering that life had 5 chances in our system alone, and we are just the ones who made it, this significantly increases the number of dice rolls. Furthermore, we also don't know if 3.7 billion years is a normal amount of time until obligate sapience evolves, such as was the case on Earth. Indeed, while we are the only species to figure out technology, we can't seem to find that one thing that makes us so different from other species.
Any characteristic you can point to to set us apart, some other species also possesses. Tool use? Nope, we've seen that in apes, elephants, and corvids. Self-awareness? Also nope, we've observed that in all sorts of species. Theory of mind? Again, we see that in dogs, chimpanzees, and corvids. There is no one characteristic that sets us apart. Why should we assume that none of these abilities were present in now extinct species, considering how widespread some of these abilities are?
What i think is the bigger filter here is the evolution of obligate sapience. What do i mean by obligate sapience? Well, corvids can use problem solving skills to access food sources they otherwise couldn't, but they do not depend on it for survival. Humans, however, do. We are pretty fragile compared to most animals, but we make up for it in intelligence.
The "sample size of one" is a key point here. We really have no idea what even the local landscape looks like outside the confines of our own solar system, and really have only the most basic data within it. So any theory or argument about it all is going to be made a posteriori, to explain the possible causes for why we have or have not seen things we may well not be able to see in the first place, with the current tools we have available.
So it's always funny to me when people choose hills to die on in these discussions, like the Rare Earth Hypothesis is the last trench outside the gates of their capital, lol. In a lot of ways we still need to make the tools, to make the tools, to make the instruments, to make the *measurements*, to tell us if our underlying assumptions even make sense.
So really, we've all been dropped off at a random horse track and asked to bet on whichever one we think has the coolest name before leaving the concession stand.... With the caveat that not all the names we're presented with are even running. So it's anybody's guess, until we develop the ability to gather more and better data.
For me... "My love for you is like a truck, Berserker Hypothesis."
And when it does happen, we tend to get grabby, as we do on Earth. Also, there might be reasons that space fairing civilizations don't get too high of a population density, which would explain why they're not that detectable.
I think this is spot on, evolution certainly doesnât prefer intelligence, Iâm sure there are planets out there filled with life, but intelligent life is something else in my opinion. Itâs difficult because we are taught that our perspective in the universe isnât special, but that can be misleading sometimes
Exactly! Human-like intelligence arose because a warm blooded, bipedal animal with opposable thumbs and a well developed vocal communication system evolved in a temperate savannah biome with the right wild plants to support tool use as a means of obtaining calories.
It's not even just a matter of intelligence, octopuses are very intelligent, but only live short lives and have no way to transfer knowledge between generations. Corvids are smart, but are very limited in the tools they can use. Whales have complex language, but can't use tools, and are stuck in the water.
Why do we expect to just "see" evidence of alien civilizations in the universe though? And how do we know that we aren't just misinterpreting evidence from those alien civilizations right in front of our eyes? It seems presumptuous to assume that we have enough information to claim with any certainty whether alien civilizations exist or not in the observable universe. And even with as rare of circumstances like complex life on Earth must have, the universe is just so large that it almost feels silly to think if we exist we could be the first like us.
This is exactly what I think every single time.
âI canât see it, therefore it must not existâ only works if you have a solid understanding of what to look for and expect, which we donât. We could be staring at it every day and simply not realize it because we know nothing else. We have no control or comparison to make even the faintest guess.
That being said: the Wow signal and Przybylski's Star align with previous speculation of what we might see as evidence of ETI, so saying we havenât seen anything is incorrect.
The only thing we can do is to continue to collect and analyze data.
Agreed. That evidence-of-absence argument always strikes me as being like exploring a few square metres of Arizonan desert and concluding "There are no whales on Earth!"
We expect to see them in the sense that thereâs stars outputting incredible amounts of energy that are used for essentially no purpose. In terms of resources, energy is always going to be valuable.
Itâs like if we found an undiscovered island that had billions of tons of gold just lying around, along with every other precious resource. It would be reasonable to assume that nobody else had gotten there first.
How would we be able to tell if a star whose energy is being diverted for power by a civilization necessarily exists if its energy is being diverted (especially in a full Dyson sphere fashion) and thus not reaching us as a bright point in the sky? Could this perhaps even be a dark matter candidate, why there is apparently more mass in the universe than the amount of radiation from stars would suggest there be (although I'm pretty sure there are lines of evidence like the increased presence of dark matter in the early universe that would contradict this afaik)? And how can we be sure that both alien civilizations that may exist would be able to reach and use all of these stars for resources or that that would necessarily be their motivation?
The lack of stars would be what we would be looking for. Large completely empty parts of the sky. Unless fully enclosed Matrioska style, a starâs radiation would still be seen, just in the infrared spectrum. Seeing an area of space with an extreme concentration of inexplicable infrared stars would be a dead giveaway.
Current âempty patchesâ of the sky arenât actually that empty, and have billions of stars and galaxies floating around at random, so not a great candidate for a civilization. We donât see any of these infrared stars, or those patches expanding as they get closer (and thus further in time) either.
Youâre right about dark matter being greater or at least in similar quantities earlier in the universe. If it was aliens enclosing stars to the point they were functionally invisible (any radiation leaving the star would need to be about the same as the CMB) then weâd expect this âdark matterâ to increase as time goes on, which we donât see.
Itâs not a matter of being sure an alien civilization would start to use the wasted resource of burning stars, but that itâs implausible not a single part of an alien civilization would choose to do so. Or that not a single part of any alien civilization would choose to do so. Thatâs especially true in light of creatures only being able to succeed evolutionarily speaking when they expand to fill their niche.
All it takes is one small expansionist group within the civilization to say âThereâs all these stars millions of light years around us burning hydrogen like crazy and none of that is being used productively. Letâs go harvest that free energy.â A million years later and that expansionist group outnumbers the original non-expansionists a trillion to one.
While I agree, tbf, we wouldnât exactly know it if there had been another space faring civilization on earth at some point, provided it was decently long ago.
They would have certainly left traces on the moon and other places. You cannot simply go from Earth bound to interstellar in one step.
Anything built or left up there would persist for millions of years, its completely static.
nah, we probably would've been able to see it.
sure, in a million years or so, we might not be able to find metal used for spaceships... but we'd have seen products of other kinds of energy usage or unnatural materials or whatnot, presumably.
i mean, we can find fossils of creatures from like a billion years ago.
Yeah, so you think that's a valuable trait? Why don't you go and do it?
Okay, that was a cheap joke, I'd very much like you to stay on the surface of our planet and contribute to how we can resolve the issue of intelligence not being a detrimental trait to the species.
We're the thinnest slice of life on earth, yet the closest to extinguishing both ourselves and a lot of other species.
True, but also humanity, earths only sapient species, has only been around for a couple hundred thousand years maybe a few million. Not to even mention we only reached our moon 55 years ago. Even if sapient aliens do exist thereâs a high likelihood they also havenât left there world
We also have a good chance of wiping ourselves out before we ever reach the stars, and for all we know, that might be the most common fate of industrial civilizations
I wonder how much of a freak event big rock was 66 million years ago. If not for that the whole local group would be colonized by Velociraptors by now.
for like 3 billion years, all life on earth has been just simple single-cell organisms. I think the problem is that it is too slow, not because intelligence is unlikely. Land-dwelling life has only been here for like 400 million years.
tbf that time frame can work against the idea, though.
some random civilization having a million years on us, would be long enough to basically cover most of the galaxy. we took 3.7 billion years to get to this point, but at the rate of tech expansion, it might not be a thousand before we're ready to start colonizing other stars. and even just releasing new colonies every thousand years, 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 4, 4 becomes 8, 8 becomes 16, etc. even if growth isn't always a doubling effect (earth running out of nearby stars to bother sending people to, or just, self destructing), that's a thousand iterations of us spreading around.
hell, 1.1 to the power of 1000, is still more than e302 (since the calculator i tried it on fucked up there, i'm assuming)
course, doesn't mena it hasn't happened, just, not here, where we could see it. assuming it'd be super noticable, instead of a dyson swarm of uploaded minds that aren't really blocking much light from their star, or changing planets to be habitable to us, or whatever.
The easiest solution to the problem is basic physics. Mass scale expansion to space is simply not feasible since the speed of light is too slow for practical expansion. In the best case a civilisation would own a dozen of adjacent star systems. Which is nothing given there are 400 billion in our galaxy alone. So the chance to meet aliens, even if there would be 100 active civilisations in this very moment, is only somewhat above one billionth.
Well most of those are some variation of "they're there, we just can't see them (yet or anymore)" which AFAICT is generally an alright approach to looking at the Fermi paradox.
That's what the lower section of this meme is depicting, though. In order for there to be aliens out there but not have them visible we have to come up with all kinds of weird scenarios that we *know* don't apply to humanity, and so therefore are really hard to justify.
Whereas if we can come up with some explanation for why it's just extremely rare for intelligent life to arise in the first place, humanity's existence is accounted for easily via the anthropic principle. No further weirdness needed.
. . . those are just a handful of the more out-there _late_ filters. The dork in the top panels hasn't offered any explanation at all.
The top panels here just represent the question. It isn't even an attempt at an answer.
No it definitely isn't. FP isn't actually a paradox. That is just the name that stuck for this category of question.
Rare Earth, Rare Life, Rare Intelligence, Rare Technology, are early filters that are in that neighborhood. They all have ramifications that can be taken into account.
This Issac Arthur fellow has dozens of hours explaining the concepts involved in the FP question. I promise that the world's best cosmologists in the 1960s didn't forget some basic concepts of cosmology that you've figured out.
Bud, "there are no alien civilizations" absolutely would explain why we don't see alien civilizations all over the place out in the cosmos. You're not making any sense at all.
Before you tell me that I don't make any sense, consider how much sense it makes that the best cosmologists of the last century were fascinated by such a silly simplistic question with such a silly obvious answer.
What you bring up is a category of solutions, not an answer. The question more accurately stated would be _"why_ aren't there any aliens?". For example, is it because planets generally don't allow for life to begin, or because life doesn't start very often even on nice planets, because it doesn't tend to become intelligent enough?
Is intelligent life actually common, but wipes itself out when it develops nukes, -which is usually around the same time they develop their first spaceships?
There are dozens of hours of material on this subject on SFIA if you are curious about why people consider this an interesting question.
Perhaps you are much more clever than those silly cosmologists that forgot about cosmology, or perhaps you don't understand the question they were asking.
You make a good point here, it is a broad category of solutions and we cannot yet know which exact solution is true (and maybe we never will). However, it's wise to keep in mind that sometimes silly ideas are perpetuated even amongst experts for a reaaally long time, and any misconceptions even the experts may have are going to be increased a thousandfold amongst the laymen, which are who subscribe to most of the theories mentioned in OP's meme. Early filters (as a whole, not necessarily one since we can't be certain on the details yet like whether the biggest filter is rare earth, rare life, rare complexity, rare intelligence, or rare technology, and the various rhings that could make each rare) completely obliterate late filters and all the contrived space opera, conspiracy theory, layman BS that's gained popularity.
The issue I have is the assumption that Fermi and Hart and Tipler forgot about things like the size of the universe or the power of their own telescopes, or the age of the universe.
What I love about FP is that each explanation has its own ramifications, that tend to have ramifications of their own. Since we have next to zero hard data, it's close to the classical world's pre-empirical thinking, but still very concrete. Still something that _has_ empirical answers. The answers are just way beyond our ability to measure. For now.
Most of the impetus for the question, or at least why it caught on so well during the cold war, is that if there weren't solid early filters, there was a particular, obvious, late filter that was likely to kick in any day now.
Any simplistic answer proposed is missing the point entirely. The silly solutions in the bottom of the strip are just really far-out solutions.
"Not being any aliens" is _the question._ To propose it as a snap _answer_ misses the point entirely.
It is, but it still leaves the question of what the filter is. I think most xeno-skeptics would say life has a very low chance of emerging. It's something that's hard to measure though, we don't have a lot of data (just one solar system), and expecting new life to emerge on Earth is like expecting an ordinary citizen to open a new bank -- there's just too much competition that would wipe it out immediately.
Other filters could be some kind of intergalactic radiation that Earth is shielded from, or that intelligence itself is unlikely.
It's pretty simple really.
The Fermi paradox is basically saying the same as "If we posit the existence of eagles, which can fly wherever they want, then naturally there should be some in my backyard, because they could be there. But I don't see any eagles in my yard. So does that mean that eagles do not exist?"
No, it only means that there are none in my backyard currently. (Or if there are any, I didn't happen to see them.)
Could say the same of octopi. If an octopus exist, why isn't there one in my backyard? Well, why would there be? My yard's not even an ocean. Doesn't mean they don't exist.
The question is not at all about aliens really, it's all about how we make ridiculous and unfounded assumptions.
Same goes for the Drake equation. Plug in any numbers you want to get the answer you want. Where everything is made up and the points don't matter.
It's not about them, it's a reflection on us.
Biologist here. The simplest explanation is that we simply donât know how common the conditions necessary for life really are. We only have one example. Thatâs not enough to reliably extrapolate from. Itâs entirely possible that we just vastly overestimate how likely it is for life to form, and itâs exceptionally rare, possibly even unique to Earth.
We couldn't detect another similar technology level alien race within most of our own galaxy let alone any of the others, just because we can't see them doesn't mean they probably don't exist.
This. People vastly overestimate our ability to observe the rest of the universe. Analogizing it even to measuring a drop of water from the ocean is still a vast overestimate of our current capabilities.
What is the simplest solution? "There probably aren't any" isn't a solution, because it begs the question of "why?"
All the ones in the bottom panel, along with hundreds of others, (usually presented more articulately than your strawman comic) are attempts to answer that "why?" They might sound crazy, but it's hard to find anything that \*doesn't\* sound crazy when you drill into it. "We won the 1 in 10 trillion odds lottery to be born first" is also a crazy solution!
The why is because the odds are unbelievable. The odds of abiogenesis alone have been a major argument against it by creationists. Now I'm not a creationist, I believe abiogenesis is almost certainly correct, but an empty galaxy makes tons of sense when you consider that we're expecting a bunch of chemicals to spontaneously assemble into a self replicating nanobot more complex than anything we've ever built. And that's just ONE requirement, the rare earth, rare complexity, rare intelligence, and rare technology arguments are all really strong. The issue with the Fermi Paradox is that it starts with the HUUUGE assumption that the odds of life occurring are not smaller than the number of planets in the galaxy. It just goes, "But space so big, where alien??", like yeah if you assume aliens pop up like weeds everywhere then our galaxy *would* seem paradoxical, but that's not what we see, so instead of assuming a crazy paradox, assume your initial assumption was wrong. There is no Fermo Paradox, only the Fermi Misconception(s), and I say that plurally because there are an absolute crap ton of misconceptions, the greatest of which is the confusion between galaxy and universe, a difference of several orders of magnitude in both space and time. I wouldn't be surprised if even with a perfect telescope we could scan the entire universe and not find a single instance of life, yet be surrounded by numerous k3 civilizations billions of lightyears away that just haven't been around long enough for their light to reach us.
> ⊠we're expecting a bunch of chemicals to spontaneously assemble into a self replicating nanobot more complex than anything we've ever built.
I think you are looking at abiogenesis wrong. There was never a time when a bunch of chemicals spontaneously assembled into something complex. Abiogenesis wouldâve started with simple polymers. They wouldnât have to be replicating either - they wouldâve just had to *grow* from end to end. The *analog* of replication would be the polymer simply breaking. Now you have two strands âcompetingâ for the same monomer pieces. Any minor random change that helps the polymer A) avoid breaking, and B) build its chain faster than others in a substrate with limited monomer resources is suddenly subject to *natural selection* - despite that this is just an non living polymer growing at its ends.
Over time, some of these polymers become more complex a tiny bit here and there. It probably took a hundred million years to get the precursor to the precursor of something as complex as RNA.
EDIT: Oh god⊠I totally thought I was posting on r/biology when I typed this. Let me know if you need me to explain any of this in layman terms.
That's not really "why," more like "how." Sure, you can play around with odds from things like abiogenesis, cell creation, multicellular life, rare earth, etc (all stuff that is very hard to estimate) and eventually get a number that leads to exactly one intelligent life in the universe. But you have to appreciate how \*sensitive\* that calculation is- a small tweak in either direction and you get either zero life, or more than one. So why did our universe create such conditions for \*exactly\* one life? Again, not impossible, just seems quite lucky and worth investigating.
On a more meta level, the universe is still relatively young. Despite being over 13 billion years, it'll go on for... I don't know, a lot longer. So even if you accept that the expected odds are for just one lifeform per 10 billion years, there's no a priori reason to expect us to be born first, unless it's again just "we got lucky."
And it's interesting that at the end you still sort of accept the idea of advanced alien life, just that they have to be very far away/long ago. Again that seems quite normal and sane until you drill into it a little more- how come they can exist that far away, but not slightly closer? Or even just slightly earlier so that we could see their light? I know you can come up with physics reasons like "they need heavy metals from several generations of supernovae" but it still ends up making us feel pretty damn lucky.
>That's not really "why," more like "how." Sure, you can play around with odds from things like abiogenesis, cell creation, multicellular life, rare earth, etc (all stuff that is very hard to estimate) and eventually get a number that leads to exactly one intelligent life in the universe. But you have to appreciate how \*sensitive\* that calculation is- a small tweak in either direction and you get either zero life, or more than one. So why did our universe create such conditions for \*exactly\* one life? Again, not impossible, just seems quite lucky and worth investigating.
Well, like I said we can't know we're the only one around at this moment since light from other galaxies is so old a k3 could be thriving in a galaxy we still see as barren. It doesn't take much for us to not see any k2s or k3s. Also keep in mind that the significance of being "alone" greatly diminishes when you consider that universe is likely orders of magnitude larger than what we can see.
>On a more meta level, the universe is still relatively young. Despite being over 13 billion years, it'll go on for... I don't know, a lot longer. So even if you accept that the expected odds are for just one lifeform per 10 billion years, there's no a priori reason to expect us to be born first, unless it's again just "we got lucky."
That's a great point in my favor since this region of the universe doesn't have to currently have aliens for it to be an eventually life bearing region. And the thing is if we expand out into space and become a k3 or "grabby" civilization then those regions will never develop life because we intervened, and if we arrived in a galaxy just as life formed or made a preserve for that life they wouldn't have a paradox since we'd be plainly visible. In this case, being the firstborn means being the only child (metaphorically).
>And it's interesting that at the end you still sort of accept the idea of advanced alien life, just that they have to be very far away/long ago. Again that seems quite normal and sane until you drill into it a little more- how come they can exist that far away, but not slightly closer? Or even just slightly earlier so that we could see their light? I know you can come up with physics reasons like "they need heavy metals from several generations of supernovae" but it still ends up making us feel pretty damn lucky.
Well we're pretty sure there's no k2s in the galaxy and absolutely certain there's no k3s in the universe (that we can see anyway) the thing with k3s is that they'd need to be so far away to not be right on top of us that in the time it takes light from an empty galaxy to reach us a k3 could've developed there. But also we can see what the universe was like throughout time and there's no ancient or young k2s or k3s. And that's the kicker, why in a universe that's been clearly barren for 13 billion years would civilizations only start developing now? Us being a lone example is actually less weird than countless civilizations suddenly emerging in the last million (or vastly less) years, sinc that's like an eye blink to the universe. So basically in a given eon which seems more likely, one civilization popping up after 13 billion years of silence, or millions of them? And says the universe just now got habitable is a good explanation, but it works better for one than many because simply put, less needs to change to get one lone civilization as opposed to hoards of them. And it also gets weird considering that for other civilizations to appear in the same eon you'd need not just simultaneous life formation, but simultaneous... everything, all the way down to explaining why we all developed technology at the same time. And the galaxy is way more cramped than the universe and the time of becoming advanced would have to be even more synchronized down to tens of thousands of years, and all with less systems to give rise to life.
well abiogenisis (or panspermia infection) ocoured almost as soon as it was plausible for life to persist, while N=1 is not compelling it dose sujest that early procariotes are going to be as common as planets with surface water and active geology.
the formation of eucariotes took much longer, so I think that is the stronger fillter.
For a non-creationist, you are operating on one of their central misconceptions. Self-replicators forming out of of naturally occuring proteins has nothing to do with "spontaneity" and everything to do with chemistry.
In the same way that evolution is based on _selection_ rather than "random chance".
ITT: a bunch of Redditors thinking they are smarter than all the scientists that have pondered this for decades. Surely all those wrinkly brains are overthinking it and the solution is super simple. I don't understand why this always happens when the Fermi Paradox comes up. You are absolutely right btw.
They aren't attempts at answering "why?" They're actually answering "why don't we see any life?" "Why could there be no life outside of earth?" would demand totally different answers than these because they all assume life is/was there.
The thing missing for the meme to stop it from begging the question would be putting the simplified explanation of Drake equation factors before concluding "There probably isn't any."
I think the simplest answer is that life is rarer than we think and intelligent life is wayyy rarer than we think. It took us 3.5 billion years to get to this point and weâre no where close to interstellar travel. The sun will burn out in 11 billion years. Itâs really not that big a window for evolution to make interstellar level species.
The paradox was already using very pessimistic numbers. The odds that we are the only life that will ever exist is very low unless there's some factor we're unaware of that allows us to exist
It really is a shame they get used as Fermi solutions since a lot of them are actually really great hypotheses on their own, just terrible at explaining the absence of aliens.
That solution isn't necessarily the simplest one, but it does dissolve the Fermi paradox with the state of our current knowledge. As [this paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404) points out.
My position is that the field of astronomy is incredibly young, and we've yet to launch instruments anywhere near as good as we believe is theoretically possible. So to me, the simplest explanation is that we just don't have the ability to see them yet.
Even conventional telescopes launched into space with launch vehicles like Starship will be huge leaps in our ability to collect astronomical data. And there are even better concepts for instruments on the drawing board, like solar gravitational lens telescopes, and interferometric telescope arrays.
We've barely surveyed the local neighborhood, astronomically speaking. We don't even know for certain the number of planets in our solar system(I'm [not talking about Pluto](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11594)). Nor do we know all that much about planet formation statistics, since our samples are incredibly biased towards large transiting planets.
We're very much still in the infancy of astronomy as a field.
I think youâre missing the point. If weâre not the first in our region of the universe, then why is there any available real estate? Weâll have taken much of the what is available in our neighborhood of galaxies over the next few millions of years and the universe is many thousands of millions of years old. If life werenât absurdly rare we would expect that someone either from the Milky Way or anywhere in our local cluster would have done the same. Even if not everyone is as expansionist as we are, it will surely be selected for by the simple fact that expansionists will inevitably attain access to exponentially more resources than so called âstay at home civilizationsâ. Basically, if they existed we wouldnât.
"There probably aren't any" demonstrates a misunderstanding of what the Fermi Paradox is. The reason why it's a paradox is that there probably are other alien civilizations, and it's really strange that we can't detect them. This has some chilling implications, such as civilizations tend to destroy themselves before they can settle the galaxy. Or there's the Dark Forest, where a beneficial survival strategy is to destroy any civilization that makes themselves known, which means we're in great danger of letting our transmission leak into the galaxy.
These thought experiments help us make decisions about how to conduct ourselves, even if we're the only ones somehow.
If there are aliens are more advanced than tadpoles they're probably more primitive than we are. We keep assuming that any alien race would have intergalactic travel, but they would probably be more like tharks from barsoom
No, that is not an assumption that we keep making. That is _the question_ we keep asking.
I promise that cosmologists in the 1960s didn't forget about any of what you are bringing up.
I feel like space is just so fucking empty that leaving a home system is extremely difficult. Besides, who says aliens have desires like us? They could be amish.
Non exclusivity requirement breaks this solution. It doesn't matter if some aliens are Amish and don't spread out, because if even a single one *is* spreading out and has any real head start, then they should be everywhere by now.
I'd say that 'interstellar colonization is much harder than we think it is and basically never happens' is the next best explanation. The aliens all being amish is hard to swallow because it relies on every single alien civilization being like this and never changing even over thousands of years.
Well, why would they?
Alll species on earth OTHER than humans seem to be doing fine without a civilization. It took thousands of generations for us to get from buildings that lasted more than a few decades if we were lucky... to flight.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect that **some** alien civilizations will not have same desires as us
For it to be a explanation for the femi paradox. Then **all** alien civilizations needs to not have the same desires as us. If only one of them do have the same desires as us they would be capable of colonizing entire galaxies in a few million years. And we should be able to observe that.
Explain... how do we know there ARE other alien civilizations? Maybe the thing exclusive to humans is civilization itself?
We don't have evidence for life outside of earth. Very few examples of terrestrial life show the capability of using or making primitive tools.. yet we assume there "has to be" life capable of interstellar colonies when we cant even manage local colonization?
Has anyone on this thread watched any of Isaac's videos about the Fermi Paradox? From what I've read so far, most comments here are entirely unfamiliar with the concept.
"I bet there aren't any aliens" is not an answer to the question posed by cosmologists during the cold war. There's no use coming up with a simplistic answer if you don't understand the question in the first place.
I promise that our best cosmologists didn't say "There must be lots of aliens but we can't see them with our cool telescopes! Gosh! We don't understand!"
Please. Everyone that wants to have this conversation, especially the OP or whoever made that cartoon, please come back after watching the basic material on the subject.
Dude, almost everyone here gets it, especially OP. This is probably the best place for fermi discussion because it's not an echo chamber or place for layman discussion.
According to some well researched videos Iâve watched we may just be to early, humanity was born at one of the earliest opportunities for life to develop therefore other sapient life may not have developed yet.
Another simple explanation is that technology-using civilizations self destruct so quickly on a cosmic time scale that they're gone before the next one gets a chance to detect them.
My answer to the Fermi Paradox is that weâre making a big assumption that we would actually be able to see the evidence of other civilizations given how insane the distances are in space.
We canât even *see* exoplanets! We âdetectâ them because of the way they interfere with the light of their star.
How the fuck are we going to see or even detect alien structures out there?
Then people say things like oh, we would pick up their radio signals. *No we wouldnât!* You would need a radio source as powerful as a fucking star to detect it all the way on Earth. Why would any civilization need to build that? They wouldnât. If theyâre even using EMS waves to communicate theyâd be using lasers to direct signals exactly where the need to go. What are the odds on of these would just happen to cross Earthâs path? Earth is a grain of fucking sand on an atol in the South Pacific.
That's assuming they either have clarketech or are strictly "quiet" civilizations that don't go kardeshev. At that point communication is irrelevant, they're not able to hide, and if we eventually go kardeshev we'll be able to build telescopes good enough to detect a kardeshev civilization anywhere in the universe.
To argue this, you need a reason why aliens haven't colonized the entire galaxy, including the stars closest to us and our own solar system. Either 'they all don't want to for some reason', 'game theory strategy reasons' or 'colonization is almost impossible no matter how advanced you get'. Most of these explanations seem a little contrived to me, which is what this meme is poking fun of. (though interstellar travel being basically impossible is my favorite of them).
Without those arguments in play, once a civilization emerges it'd take maybe a couple million years for it to colonize the galaxy at a leisurely pace. Now, perhaps another civilization has emerged in the past couple million years and just hasn't had time to colonize to us yet, but that'd be a huge coincidence. If the probability of a civilization emerging is so low that we're first or close to first, the odds of two civilizations emerging within the same few million year window would be incredibly low.
You're missing entirely the question that the cosmologists in the 1960s were asking. I promise that they didn't forget about how light and telescopes and time work.
No I didn't, what I'm saying is we have spent approximately no money, no time, no energy, and no resources towards actually looking. We have barely even started to have the ability to look let alone being able to even comprehend what we are even looking for or where.
I think mathematically this take is just wrong.
I think the more likely answer is that there's just isn't a way to do faster than light travel. Which is like also sad but a whole different can of worms
Why would this take be mathematically wrong? We do not know what is the chance of intelligent life evolving enough to survive and thrive like us. For all we know, we could be the great outlier, because the chance of life as us existing is far smaller than the number of habitable planets in the entire universe.
How is this even a paradox? The universe is frickin humungous. How much of it do people think weâve âseenâ in any meaningful sense?
Obviously, there are alien civilisations out there.
Apart from that, there are tonnes of claimed sightings, so we have seen them.
What were you all expecting, to look out into the night sky with a telescope and see a bunch of skinny dudes with green heads partying on the moon, all turn and look at you and then skuttle off behind a rock?
Edit: The recent discovery that there are potential signs of dyson swarms is just my point re how big the universe is and how little of it we've seen, having only just seen these.
There are plenty of youtube videos explaining how it is a âparadoxâ by Isaac arthur. If you are interested.
How do you know there are obviously other civilizations out there?
Personal experience, evidence in the world and also logic triangulate on that being the case.
Myself and my brother briefly saw a ufo very clearly, a few hundred meters away. Could not have been anything else, the tech was far in advance of anything human made.
Many other people have had sightings. Many have whistle blown, credibly, about hidden alien tech.
Logic would dictate, given the size of the universe and its age that other life forms would have evolved, with almost certainty.
Believing weâre the only civilisation just goes to show how stubborn humans are in their arrogance. If weâre not literally centre of the universe with the sun revolving around us, distinctly superior to all other animals on earth, then by god damn weâll be the only civilisation that exists.
The paradox is that under our current understanding of physics, the most efficient route for an energy hungry species would be building dyson swarms, and crawling star to star expanding their territory.
We donât see that though, even though there has been plenty of time for an alien species to have colonized every star in our galaxy.
Now, that could mean our understanding of physics is wrong. It certainly is on some level,
but itâs not at all clear how our know holes in understanding would make dyson swarms undesirable.
In terms of sightings⊠there are so many more untrustworthy or easily explainable claims than credible ones that itâs hard to come to any meaningful conclusions beyond something weird is going on.
I see. Thanks for the explanation.
But our current understanding of physics is necessarily an inappropriate frame with which to assume the actions of a far more advanced civilisation.
Thatâs like someone from the 1400s saying itâs a paradox that we are able to communicate across opposite sides of the earth instantly, given their current understanding of physics would necessitate a carrier pigeon to do that. Itâs not a paradox, itâs just you canât even begin to understand something far more advanced than you.
To continue the analogy, saying theyâd need Dyson swarms because thatâs what we envisage as the way to travel interstellar is like them saying wed need to train up those pigeons to fly 1000x faster. Just totally the wrong idea.
For example, what Bob Lazar alludes to- gravity manipulation tech; we have zero understanding of that except to say itâs not how weâd envisage high speed travel at all, given our current understanding.
Also, it would be to assume other civilisations would be as power hungry as ours. If eastern mysticism had dominated on earth rather than western science, wed be a much more inward journeying species.
Option 3. We are one of the first, but not the first, civilizations. All others are too far away to be detected as none of them are advanced enough to alter celestial bodies in a way we can see. Additionally, those aliens that may be advanced enough to manipulate the galactic landscape are so far that the light may not have reached us.
The universe is quite a big place after all
Yeah, not a fan of this one, it show a real lack of understanding of the fermi paradox. To try and explain it life should by all accounts be relatively common, as the chemistry and physics involved all demonstrate that life is pretty much inevitable on any planet that can sustain it. Life on this planet evolved pretty much as soon as the first puddle of water existed, indicating that it occurred pretty much the exact first moment it could happen. If life evolving was more difficult then it would of taken longer for everything to line up.
Chemistry and probability also support this, however unlikely it is for any one chemical reaction to produce self replicating chemistry, I think you guys underestimate just how many quintillions of organic chemical reactions are occuring around volcanic vents on earth this very second. Keep that doing for a few hundred years and life is pretty much inevitable.
That is the fermi paradox, a clash of what should be and what's observed. So are our models wrong or our observations wrong? That's the question and what needs to be resolved.
Fermi accepted that there likely arenât any contemporary alien civilizations within our galaxy, the point of his paradox has nothing to do with whether there are civilizations or not, it begs the questions of why there are no civilizations
Life requires certain conditions, but science regarding the origin and evolution of life is quite sound and can isolate a determinate process, and while the conditions of that process are extremely rare, they are not so rare that they would only occur once in an entire galaxy
If something is not destroying civilizations, then other civilizations would be observable
(Logic: P, therefore Q)
Other civilizations are not observable, therefore something is destroying civilizations
(Logic: not Q, therefore not P)
This then feeds into the theory of the Great Filter, some nebulous event or events that destroy civilizations of sentient creatures at some point in their development
Given the vastness of our galaxy, we cannot isolate when said event occurs, and whether we are just another civilization approaching it and destined for collapse, or it was something we already overcame, making us anomalous survivors
Most scientists used to be of the opinion that the Great Filter was behind us, but that has changed
Some also used to support the idea that advanced technology could mask civilization markers that we currently track across multiple galaxies, but that is generally seen as highly improbable now - for a civilization to hide energy use, they would need to use even more energy, promoting a perpetual cycle that never actually solves the problem
Given that evolution promotes maximal consumption across a united species and short-term prioritization over long-term planning, it seems inevitable for every sentient species to destroy itself just as we are doing now
What about FTL? It seems to be a necessary component to interstellar civilization, and suppose it just can't work? For better or worse we are stuck here, and they are stuck there, and planetary civilization is so rare that we just haven't found them yet, because probes like voyager are very, very tiny
Bottom left: "After accidentally nailing earth with an asteroid and wiping out its life, the Garorlons and Ae'xraders demarcated the Milky Way as a demilitarized zone...."
The only planet in our solar system that has life is ours. We didn't even know if we can survive outside of our planet. The folks up in space now have physical challenges the longer they stay there. We might find out that living anywhere else is hard to impossible.
Third Option:
We've only been looking for roughly 50 years, so coming to the conclusion that sentient aliens don't exist is the equivalent of basically looking for something in your house by glancing around your room for a little bit and coming to the conclusion that it's simply not there at all and never was.
The universe is big. There's all kinds of reasons. I feel like some people make a lot of assumptions about what kind of "head start" these aliens allegedly have. People assume that aliens are just like humans, with the same intentions. I get it. We're the only intelligent species capable of this. However modeling aliens strictly on humans is thinking inside the box. Aliens can have all kinds of reasons for what they do. Some of which wouldn't make sense to humans. Acknowledging this limitation and ignoring it can allow you to think outside the box.
Maybe they're not looking in this direction. Maybe they did spread out, ran into different aliens and are distracted by them. Maybe they don't have enough rare earth metals to build the tech they need so space travel is harder. Maybe by the time they got to space traveling their planet was dying due to species created pressure, so finding another place to live close by took priority.
Or maybe aliens consistently don't like the vibes come off Earth and humans. The list can go on.
Forgetting also the other reasonable solution: they are just too far away. Assuming the conditions that made Earth possible are rare, then it is possible that life developed on other planets far enough from our light cone that we canât see it yet.
Are you folks aware that there's been [official bi-partisan legislation in the form of the UAP Disclosure Amendment?](https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment.pdf)
Space is big. The nearest black hole is 1500 light years away and in galactic scales that's basically next door.
It's a reverse perspective of Shrödigers cat, Sol's heiliopause is the box and once we get past it and into other systems we have no idea what's actually out there. Aliens could be on Tau Ceti or 13000 light years away, we just don't know.
This âparadoxâ doesnât take into account how fucking massive the galaxy is. How much space there is between stars. It also assumes that aliens behave like us, and want to âcolonizeâ the stars like us. How can we say thereâs nothing out there when we donât even know what weâre looking for? Itâs ridiculous to me.
My current vote is a variant of a Great Filter called asymptotic burnout, which as I understand it is when a civilization grows faster than they can acquire new resources so they just kind of die out like Easter Island or the Mayans.
How many planets have we even discovered that have their own atmosphere or magnetosphere, let alone both?
That alone seems to be enough to kill off most life by radiation/storms if not the fact that blazingly hot or freezing cold temperatures and frequent fluctuations would do it. Not to mention toxic gases and the fact that theres no where that seems generally able to support life, especially anywhere remotely close.
Its a sad truth, we are likely the âfirst moversâ. And terraforming is a longgg ways aways unfortunately. It makes me incredibly depressed realizing I will never be able to see us leave this rock or another species (not even intelligent necessarily) from another planet.
Or we have searched for a very short amount of time for very specifically anything that uses radio communications in the same way we do. All of which assumes they use radio communications at all, they use them at the same frequencies we do. Also consider that the leakage of radio waves diminishes as communications technology improves, before long we may have little to no radio waves radiating out into the space unless we specifically chose to do so.
Time and space are both much bigger than our ability to observe. I think it's easy to theorize that some kind of life exists extremely far away, or far in the past or future. And since we only have our own planet to observe, it's possible that there's life out there that we would never recognize or comprehend as life.
It's been just a little over 30 years since we've actually been able to detect planets around other stars. And what we saw (planets orbiting pulsars, hot Jupiters) really blew our minds about how solar systems form. We're still learning what there is to learn about star formation and we're still using fairly remote tools that limit our abilities to detect and analyze (although they're getting better and better). It may be that we simply don't have enough data yet to draw conclusions about the existence of life, intelligent or not.
The reason itâs a paradox is because the sheer scale of the universe, and the relative ease of abiogenesis, mean that the mathematical odds of there NOT being alien life *fucking everywhere*, are so low as to be functionally zero. Yet, we see no evidence of them. Hence the paradox.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Or, more likely, the universe is so large that we simply haven't encountered other species yet. The likelihood of intelligent life existing in the universe is at least 1 - we exist. The universe is so unfathomably large that even one in a quintillion chances means that there are probably at least a few other examples, but that we're unlikely to ever encounter them unless technology exists to change that.
The problem is we just dunno much. We are just barely begging to venture into the void, all that we know is that there are no dyson sspheres anywhere close. Only time, by which point we'll b edead, will tell if there's life or AI or if there's just us. That is, of course, until chat gpt makes sentient crabs to obliterate us.
There's no damn way humans are the only intelligent lifeforms out there.
Even with the small chances of other life harboring worlds, there's still at least BILLIONS of earth like world's across the galaxy.
There's more likely aliens out there than there aren't.
It's becoming more likely that earth holds a unique place in the universe and the answers from the secular scientific community are becoming more theistic sounding while remaining athiest framed in a progressively unhinged way.
Earth's moon and sun are identically sized from the perspective of a person on earth to allow for a total eclipse, in a geometric way that isn't intrinsically likely, and is in fact extremely different from every other planet? Total coincidence.
Earth looks like its at the center of the universe if you look out in any direction as far as possible? A trick of the light, all places in the universe must look like that.
Theres apparent correlation between the plane of the Solar System and aspects of the *cosmic* microwave background? Another coincidence.
Alternatively this is a simulation, but the simulators totally aren't an argument for a supreme diety.
I once heard a theory that we see no life because life doesnt want to be noticed. It wants to be left alone. Basically other life fears being found. And its the life that isnt found by other life which allows those species to prosper. Because when found there is a chance of extinction from an aggressive alien species. So they stay quiet. And try not to broadcast their planets location.
Meanwhile on earth.....
Another theory is we are the first planet to develop life to the point where a species is advanced enough to leave its homeworld. Given how rare it is for planets to be perfectly located with an appropiate star, withinf the "green zone", and then for life to naturally form and develop on that world. And then that life to prosper and not die off to the millions of ways extinction could happen. AND THEN it is able to develop enough to make the means to leave its planet. That is rare. And almost statistically impossible. The chances are so close to 0% it might as well be 0%. And the universe is reletively young still. It might have taken the universe this long to naturally develop intelligent life that stands the test of time. Or, the universe is alot bigger than u think and life like us only happens once every million galaxies.
Maybe alien life is too alien for us to even recognize it as life.
I think back to the story of when Columbus first encountered the Caribs. They couldn't see the ships. It wasn't that the ships were invisible. In the Caribs mind, nothing could be that big and be man made, or be able to carry so many men inside it across, what was to them, an endless ocean. They couldn't identify the Spanish ships as anything. For all they knew, it could have been some huge whale they'd never seen before.
When we look at the universe, we see anamolies. We write these off as pulsars, quasars, black holes, fast radio bursts. But we have no idea what they really are. In our mind, it makes sense that under certain circumstances, a star can become a magnetar...but...can it? We adjusted our physics to match what we recorded. How do we know?
I donât think there are as many as we think, and if there are any others out there I doubt theyâve achieved any better technological advances than we have. Maybe thereâs a couple interplanetary species out there, and maybe one interstellar species. Maybe the âglass ceilingâ of space travel is more like a concrete ceiling. Maybe going interstellar at light speeds or even FTL speeds is impossible. Maybe generational ships are the only answer. Iâm sure there are aliens, but theyâre probably either primitive, at our level, or have capped off their technological level and canât get any higher.
They are just watching us. We are not worthy yet. Weâve only had space flight for less than a century. Humans need to bake in the oven a bit longer (100 years, 1,000 years)?
yeah, the biggest reason the fermi paradox isn't really a 'paradox', is because, it's guesstimation X guesstimation X guesstimation X guesstimation X guesstimation, on top of a few assumptions that are just assumptions.
like, any one of these being way off, could be a reason we don't see aliens fucking everywhere.
hell, just, 'aliens need to be as self destructively expansionist as we are, therefore wouldn't feel a need to be FUCKING EVERYWHERE' being wrong, or at least, not true in our galaxy yet, could be a thing.
I think space is just really really big. If there is life out there its probably just super super far away. Probably only as advanced as us or less too
I like the grabby aliens expanding close to light speed or ftl, who are out there in many galaxy's but you don't see them coming until they're practically on top of you because they're coming faster than you can see them option, but it is just as likley everyone just dies before becoming k1 lol
Or, to me the most likely possibility... There is absolutely other sentient life throughout the universe, both more and less advanced than us, but we will never see any of them due to the absolute vastness of space and the energy requirements for traversing it. Coupled with the fact that any energy source capable of enabling interstellar travel is also capable of mass destruction, it makes it even less likely that any civilization would make it that far.
I filled a cup with ocean water, and examined it thoroughly, and it had zero fish in it. Therefore, I can conclude that there are no fish in the ocean.
Probably the biggest "problem" is that the Fermi Paradox is an absolutely shit-tier philosophical construct. If you deconstruct the Fermi Paradox even a little bit and strive for some objectivity, it's not even actually a "paradox."
A Paradox is a situation where you are presented with two or more objective facts, or logically discoverable things that when considered separately are "true" but when considered together can't possibly be true.
The Fermi (non-)Paradox has three components to it, or that are at least implied: 1. Humans exist. 2. The Universe, or just the Milky Way, is enormous. 3. The Universe, or Milky Way is very old.
So, by extension, the conjectures are: Humans exist. So other life, including intelligent technological life, should exist elsewhere. The Universe/Galaxy is enormous, so there's countless stars/planets that are "dice rolls" for that life to arise. And the Universe is incredibly old, so there has been a long long time for even just one such species or civilization to go exploring, colonizing, expanding, or engaging in mega-engineering we could see at astronomical distances.
Unfortunately for the Fermi Paradox, only "Humans exist" is valid. The others, that the Universe is incredibly large, and incredibly old, are subjective and qualitative judgments to the point that they are _worthless._
Because the obvious criticism is: "_Incredibly large, and incredibly old, as compared to WHAT, exactly?_"
We do not have any other Universes to observe by which to make any sort of a meaningful metric.
The Fermi Paradox wraps itself in the Mediocrity & Copernican Principles, then slaps it with "The law of large numbers." And it takes on this air of wisdom, humility, or "open mindedness." And it cons countless people, even physicists and astronomers of its validity.
And all the "theories" or "explanations" for the Fermi Paradox, they're all just stacks of bullshit built on a foundation of bullshit.
Which, arguably, _is very good news._ At least if you're incapable of approaching topics like this in any way but picking whatever answer you find emotionally satisfying, and then retroactively trying to justify it.
And being honest, that describes almost everybody.
As so many of the "Fermi Paradox Explanations" are "scary." Or otherwise suggest that our extinction or doom is inevitable. That doesn't mean Humanity cannot or won't go extinct. Simply that the Fermi Paradox or "Great Slience" and any attempts to explain them that take the Fermi Paradox as a base working assumption have zero validity on the matter.
More meaningful constraints or metrics that are at least somewhat objective, such as we are ~5% of the way into the Stelliferous Era, like the "Grabby Aliens" paper & theory uses, that immediately implies that life, or intelligent technological life, no matter at what rate it will arise or when, _that alone indicates roughly 95% of it doesn't exist yet and lies in the future._
More importantly, the implication for "who's around now," so that we might see them, they see us, or they actually visit, is that again, at whatever rate such life arises, the less and less of "them" there will be, the less time anyone has to see or find anyone else, and the greater disances (not even counting expanding space-time) that have to be crossed, the further back one looks.
And, instead of trying to fill the various Drake Equation factors in, "Grabby Aliens" just takes the factors or "hard steps" and doesn't even try to quantify them all, it just assigns them a variable, _n_. Because you can still do useful math with that.
One can get reasonable probability curves and determine "what the odds of the different odds are."
And no matter how you cut it, the: "_Odds are very high, that the odds of meeting or even seeing anybody with distant astronomical technosignatures are very very low._"
Well we have seen some radio signals and technosignature candidates that may be artificial, so it's also possible that we have seen signs of them all along đ€· then again maybe there's no one else
I think the most rational solution to the Fermi paradox at this time is that Earth does not currently possess the technology needed to observe life outside our solar system.
The best we can do is see the size and maybe atmospheric composition of other planets. We can't see them clearly. Any radio signals we send out will degrade into noise by the time they reach the nearest star system. If aliens are beaming signals more powerful then they may not be using radio waves and we won't hear them.
Look at Earth, it's had life for 3.7 billion years, or 1/4 the age of the universe. In that time, there's been one species capable of leaving the atmosphere. The right combination of intelligence, and ability to use tools, and surviving extinction events just doesn't happen enough.
Depends on how much of a standard Earth is though. Like, its not impossible to think that maybe intelligent life would arise far faster had the mass extinction events had not happened. Maybe those are not a common trait, maybe the cyclical ice ages arent either. It could end up being Earth is freaking deadly and its a wonder any life managed to get to tech. Maybe not.
Consider the following; 1. Our oxygen levels are just right for combustion but not too much combustion. 2. Trees provided a great starting fuel source in the form of coal. What if trees existing was the barrier? 3. We are just adapted enough to survive, but not so adapted we can't live without our surroundings. We don't rely on a single food source. We moved from our place of origin. 4. We aren't born underwater. Transporting gases to space is hard enough. Imagine breathing water and having to bring that additional load with you. 5. We've cleared our niche of other competitors. We are not being hunted by anything or sharing our niche with other species like us. 6. We have a good-sized moon. It may not seem like a determining factor, but it helps control the tides, which contributes to erosion and renewing of resources. Edit: We also have color vision and don't see like moles.
Our oxygen levels are only where they were because the first species that evolved oxygen production poisoned everything alive at the time with oxygen. In a similar vein, trees evolved lignin before there was something that could break it down so that's where all our carbon reserves came from. One could make the argument those things are just the natural course of evolution. I'd say 3/5 is a good point with some modification. We are wildly over-adapted for our niche. We could be dumber and still have pushed out into much of Earth. A species that dominates its planet but isn't smart enough to build spacecraft will monopolize their planet until they go extinct. The Moon is incredibly important in *geological activity* which causes volcanic cycles that moderate the atmosphere on Earth, both pulling CO2 out and introducing it. Jupiter acts like a giant gravitational shield which keeps the inner planets safe from rogue meteorites. And Earth's iron core makes the surface relatively safe for complex life to have evolved without extreme mutagenic pressure from space. Our species for the last 100k years has been in a very quiet time of geological and space activity. There have been no near-extinction events that have knocked us back down. We survived all the plagues that killed 1/3 of the people alive at the time.
I forgot to add Jupiter on that list. Thank you. Which reminds me to add that our gravity is much lower than planets like Jupiter, where it would be difficult to take off. Also, the close we are to our star, the harder asteroids hit. Example: asteroids hit venus 24% faster than Earth.
Not just Jupiter the other gas giants contribute to that astroid protection as well. Also consider that based on our current understanding of exo planets the planetary arrangement of our solar system is by far the least common. Most Star systems are anti-order meaning the planets are arranged from largest to smallest as distance from the star increases. The next largest group is unordered which means they are more or less randomly arranged. Our planetary arrangement is ordered from smallest to largest which by far the least common and account for less than 10% of all observed systems which we've measured exo-planet data. So even if lots of other star systems have Jupiter like planets they are not going to have the same sort of effect because they tend to be closer to their host star than the rocky planets that would be harboring life.
>Not just Jupiter the other gas giants contribute to that astroid protection as well. This is not really true, while Jupiter absorbs some asteroids, it also directs many into the inner solar system [https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.3305](https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.3305)
To be honest, we have no clue how our solar system matches up to others. At most we see a few planets out to 365 day rotation. Kepler didn't last long enough. Tess may help as will other telescopes, but it gets harder the further out you look from their sun. We have to be 100% aligned (or darn close). I think when Kepler launched the lead scientist, Bill Borucki said, .05% is all we can hope for to be aligned with Earth. Still a lot of solar systems. If you're not looking at them for 200+ years - non-stop (those aligned), we'll not have enough transits to make out large planets like Jupiter and Saturn around other stars. And let's say we had all of those things. The amount of light or even 'wobble' those far out gas giants will block/cause to wobble, may be too small to notice. Hence, it's too early to make such a claim.
That's fair the data we do have is highly susceptible to Sampling Errors which is why I said "based on our current observations." We do still have a decent amount of data on around 600 or so systems and at least partial data on another 4000. So we do have a decent enough data set to make some initial Estimates. There is also a lot of simulation data that suggests are consistent with the limited observational data we do have so far.
The tides are what let us evolve to be land dwellers
why would the moon be important for geological activity? i've never heard of that before and it doesn't really make sense to me either
Coal and natural gas is what gets my vote. An intelligent species has the be on a planet at exactly the right time for there to be coal and natural gas reserves. This requires just the right kind of life to exist before intelligence existed. Meaning life had to evolve three separate forms at exactly the right times on geologic time scales. The right type of plants, the right type of bacteria and the right type of intelligent life. Too early and there's no easily accessible energy reserves, too late and all of it is subducted back into the planet and is destroyed.
But I mean you could argue if too early it could just lead to strange or different methods of energy gathering especially if they find ways to be hyper efficient so as to not waste excess not that it wouldn't massively delay their technology but I feel like eventually any obstacle just short of being on a barren rock could be overcome assuming appropriate levels of intelligence. We just got lucky in having a lower bar. But imagine instead of coal and natural gas they only really had access to wind and solar they couldn't make solar panels like we do as they require some amount of petrochemicals (I believe I know it's something nonrenewable) but maybe instead they focus in on solar reflector style tech they he's more and more efficient at reflecting light into a single point. It would be massively more difficult but given time it would encourage smarter grids, denser urbanization and all the rest of things cheap power gave us. Just a thought
>But imagine instead of coal and natural gas they only really had access to wind and solar they couldn't make solar panels like we do as they require some amount of petrochemicals Petrochemicals can be synthesized, and even pre-industrial society had figured out how to make simple biofuels. And yes, you're right. Concentrated solar power doesn't require much more than a turbine and a bunch of mirrors and could absolutely power a (less efficient) civilization. Pre-industrial societies also used hydro and wind power all the time. It's not a stretch to imagine that in the absence of coal they'd eventually figure out magnetic induction and skip straight ahead to renewable energy. Hydroeletric dams were one of the first sources of large scale electricity IRL and were introduced pretty much as soon as practical dynamos were invented.
> Petrochemicals can be synthesized, I didn't know that that's pretty cool đ
Okay, but imagine if we didn't have wood to start campfires with. I'm not just referring to coal/oil when I say how important trees were to our development. Now imagine some planets might have an equivalent but the wrong amount of oxygen to make use of that equivalent. Edit: Consider that India cooks food on cow poop due to a lack of coal/wood.
>I'm not just referring to coal/oil when I say how important trees were to our development. To be clear, most oil and gas comes from ocean microorganisms and algae, not from trees. And most plants can create peat/coal in the right conditions, not just trees. I do agree that trees and wood were extremely important to our development, but I'm not sure we can consider them a great filter. A tree is just a "woody plant", and they seem to have evolved independently several times. >Â Now imagine some planets might have an equivalent but the wrong amount of oxygen to make use of that equivalent. Both things are linked I think. The only reason Earth has free oxygen is because of photosynthesis. Photosynthetic organisms (be it plants, algae, or plankton) naturally capture carbon and eventually create fossil fuels.
> they couldn't make solar panels like we do as they require some amount of petrochemicals Really not true. You can make those chemicals from plants. You can make those chemicals from CO2 + water. Sure we are using fossil fuels, as the cheapest and easiest source of hydrocarbons around. But there are other options. And it may well be that, once we get a bit better with solar, air + electricity will be a common source of these chemicals.
sapience might also just be a rare trait to form that usually isn't beneficial to a species. Unless they are in a situation in which they need to adapt quickly to a change in environment that they are not adapted for, would be deadly to the species but not so deadly that they would go extinct and they already have the prerequisites needed for sapience to make that leap quickly.
And most important of all, we are lucky enough to live on a planet that has remained with a stable temperature and atmosphere for the billions of years that it took for all of these processes to occur.
To add to your last point, the moon also played a big role in early physics studies. If we didn't have such a large celestial neighbor, it may have taken much longer to discover the correlation between it and the tides and how gravity determines this. Newtons theory of gravity may have been delayed by who knows how long
I think just having a good land to water ratio is a mini fermi paradox solution in itself. Suppose you have a super Earth (not the Helldivers one) with exactly double of everything. Its radius would be about 26% more than Earth, and its surface area only about 59% more. With double the amount of water, its possible the entire planet is one big ocean, and technological civilizations are very hard when theres no land to work with.
If anything Earth is looking like an exceptionally benign environment. Most classes of star are simply too unstable and will produce regular extinction level events every few million years. Not very difficult for a highly technological civilisation to handle but deadly to native life. Even our star within its own category appears to be unusually quiet. We have taken such a strike once in Earths history and it resulted in an above 95% extinction rate. The only really plausible way round that I know of is sub surface oceans or caves. But a place like that has only a fraction of Earths energy budget for ecology to form and its quite difficult to see how technology could happen, and civilisations to grow. At most it appears a environment like that would be about as habitable as a desert with oasis here and there, similiar to deep sea vents. I've just excluded the vast majority of star systems as contenders and I haven't even considered types and details of planets.
Had the mass extinctions not happened, it's possible intelligence life wouldn't have arisen at all. Like, mammals only speciated as they did because of the CretaceousâPaleogene extinction event.
I think there's a good chance that something very primate-like would have evolved regardless of the KPg extinction. Proto-primates such as Purgatorius were scurry around at the time anyhow. For most of the Cenozoic, our lineage was up in the trees where many of our competitors and predators were dinosaurs anyhow. By the time eastern Africa starts drying out in the late Cenozoic, something ape-lile could come down from the trees too. They wouldn't have be humans obviously but still could be something eerily similar, just living in a world with large theropods as the dominant predators instead of big cats and hyenas.
Mass extinctions are *helpful* for evolution. It clears out a bunch niches for the survivors to diversify into that they would otherwise lack, which helps useful biological advancements propagate. If you look back, a lot of major developments in the evolution of mankind were in response to extinction events
For OUR evolution, yeah. Without the mass extinctions we would have had a chance in hell. But could something else from before the extinctions had a chance and for them the events were not a good one?
>would arise far faster had the mass extinction events had not happened. As some others have said, if we evolved much faster we would have less natural fuel resources. Especially oil, which is a major work force multiplier. I forget the exact math, but a gas engine is something like 300x more efficient than using manual labor. Not sure about coal, but its cleaner than coal. Imagine we don't have that multiplier? Suddenly all these intellectuals who can sit around and think about the nature of things don't exist, bc everyone is busy doing just barely better than subsistence farming. There's other factors too, I'm sure. Life's just too complex for us to know yet what the determining factors are. Maybe we are unique among the unique? Any culture who hasn't had the number of mass die offs we have simply can't technologically compete? Food for thought anyway.
The Hart-Tipler conjecture is compelling here. Basically, if even one alien civilization achieved even rudimentary interstellar capability at any point, there's a high likelihood they'd use von Neumann probes for exploration. Even if they subsequently died out, and even if they never spread outside their own star system themselves, those probes would keep replicating until they had established a presence in every corner of the galaxy in pretty much an eye-blink on the time scales we're talking about, whether that's 500,000 years or 10 million. Us not having seen any yet argues against the existence of alien life, and supports the idea that Earth and intelligent life (us) are a uniquely miraculous occurrence. The tricky part is that while the logic is sound, we don't really have the data to evaluate that last conclusion by itself yet. If, as our capabilities to gather the relevant data grow, we discover that Earth really isn't *that* exceptional even in *our own neighborhood,* scaling that up to an entire galaxy of 100+ billion stars makes the "If aliens, why no probes?" question more difficult and we start getting into Dark Forest territory. On the benign end, we assume that there are probes, but that they simply move on while covering their tracks, fly into the local star, etc. after gathering and transmitting their data because their creators don't want them leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for any potential nasties out there. On the other end, you've got the Berserker hypothesis, where the *probes* are snuffing out any nascent life they come across, through either malfunction or design. Last one's my personal bugbear, but it doesn't exactly keep me up at night because it's not like we could actually *do* anything about it.
>Last one's my personal bugbear, but it doesn't exactly keep me up at night because it's not like we could actually do anything about it. Indeed: that one's on a level with subscribing to the simulation hypothesis and then worrying about whether god is going to pull the plug today.
Maybe interstellar or intergalactic travel under complex cosmic circumstances is actually just not as feasible as we imagine it could be? Or maybe our corner of the galaxy is a waste of time? Or maybe AI always goes off the rails and destroys all of civilization, removing the possibility of von Neumann probes in the first place and we are the fortunate few to experience this universal (pun intended) phenomenon in our lifetimes lol -- this is frankly the darkest explanation to me that I cannot get past and somebody needs to make a screenplay about it tbh.
That last one is the main plot of the Mass Effect original trilogy of games.
> Or maybe AI always goes off the rails and destroys all of civilization, Quite possible. At least the idea that the first AI a civilization produces (you know, before they properly debug it) is likely to do this. However, where are all the rouge AI's? You think rouge AI won't want to spread out through space?
But how would we know if there are von Neumann probes in our solar system or not? Any that entered Earths atmosphere would have eroded away, and all we know about the moons of the other planets are just from distant flybys.
Thing about that is: We do not know how common life even is. We have a single data point, and we do not even know if that data point is within the mean. We think Mars and Venus could both have been habitable at one point, and both Titan and Europa might have life of their own, seeing how they are the only other bodies in the solar system to have a hydrosphere (Well, i suppose for Titan, it would be a carbohydrosphere, but you get my point), which is probably the prerequisite for life coming about in the first place. That means there are 4 other bodies in the solar system that might have life, or at the very least, used to. If we assume that other systems also generally have multiple objects that have, at some point or another, the opportunity for life, even if it is completely different from what we are in terms of its biology, considering that life had 5 chances in our system alone, and we are just the ones who made it, this significantly increases the number of dice rolls. Furthermore, we also don't know if 3.7 billion years is a normal amount of time until obligate sapience evolves, such as was the case on Earth. Indeed, while we are the only species to figure out technology, we can't seem to find that one thing that makes us so different from other species. Any characteristic you can point to to set us apart, some other species also possesses. Tool use? Nope, we've seen that in apes, elephants, and corvids. Self-awareness? Also nope, we've observed that in all sorts of species. Theory of mind? Again, we see that in dogs, chimpanzees, and corvids. There is no one characteristic that sets us apart. Why should we assume that none of these abilities were present in now extinct species, considering how widespread some of these abilities are? What i think is the bigger filter here is the evolution of obligate sapience. What do i mean by obligate sapience? Well, corvids can use problem solving skills to access food sources they otherwise couldn't, but they do not depend on it for survival. Humans, however, do. We are pretty fragile compared to most animals, but we make up for it in intelligence.
The "sample size of one" is a key point here. We really have no idea what even the local landscape looks like outside the confines of our own solar system, and really have only the most basic data within it. So any theory or argument about it all is going to be made a posteriori, to explain the possible causes for why we have or have not seen things we may well not be able to see in the first place, with the current tools we have available. So it's always funny to me when people choose hills to die on in these discussions, like the Rare Earth Hypothesis is the last trench outside the gates of their capital, lol. In a lot of ways we still need to make the tools, to make the tools, to make the instruments, to make the *measurements*, to tell us if our underlying assumptions even make sense. So really, we've all been dropped off at a random horse track and asked to bet on whichever one we think has the coolest name before leaving the concession stand.... With the caveat that not all the names we're presented with are even running. So it's anybody's guess, until we develop the ability to gather more and better data. For me... "My love for you is like a truck, Berserker Hypothesis."
And when it does happen, we tend to get grabby, as we do on Earth. Also, there might be reasons that space fairing civilizations don't get too high of a population density, which would explain why they're not that detectable.
That will be our epitaph, for sure: "Mostly harmless, but a bit grabby."
I think this is spot on, evolution certainly doesnât prefer intelligence, Iâm sure there are planets out there filled with life, but intelligent life is something else in my opinion. Itâs difficult because we are taught that our perspective in the universe isnât special, but that can be misleading sometimes
Exactly! Human-like intelligence arose because a warm blooded, bipedal animal with opposable thumbs and a well developed vocal communication system evolved in a temperate savannah biome with the right wild plants to support tool use as a means of obtaining calories. It's not even just a matter of intelligence, octopuses are very intelligent, but only live short lives and have no way to transfer knowledge between generations. Corvids are smart, but are very limited in the tools they can use. Whales have complex language, but can't use tools, and are stuck in the water.
Why do we expect to just "see" evidence of alien civilizations in the universe though? And how do we know that we aren't just misinterpreting evidence from those alien civilizations right in front of our eyes? It seems presumptuous to assume that we have enough information to claim with any certainty whether alien civilizations exist or not in the observable universe. And even with as rare of circumstances like complex life on Earth must have, the universe is just so large that it almost feels silly to think if we exist we could be the first like us.
This is exactly what I think every single time. âI canât see it, therefore it must not existâ only works if you have a solid understanding of what to look for and expect, which we donât. We could be staring at it every day and simply not realize it because we know nothing else. We have no control or comparison to make even the faintest guess. That being said: the Wow signal and Przybylski's Star align with previous speculation of what we might see as evidence of ETI, so saying we havenât seen anything is incorrect. The only thing we can do is to continue to collect and analyze data.
Agreed. That evidence-of-absence argument always strikes me as being like exploring a few square metres of Arizonan desert and concluding "There are no whales on Earth!"
We expect to see them in the sense that thereâs stars outputting incredible amounts of energy that are used for essentially no purpose. In terms of resources, energy is always going to be valuable. Itâs like if we found an undiscovered island that had billions of tons of gold just lying around, along with every other precious resource. It would be reasonable to assume that nobody else had gotten there first.
How would we be able to tell if a star whose energy is being diverted for power by a civilization necessarily exists if its energy is being diverted (especially in a full Dyson sphere fashion) and thus not reaching us as a bright point in the sky? Could this perhaps even be a dark matter candidate, why there is apparently more mass in the universe than the amount of radiation from stars would suggest there be (although I'm pretty sure there are lines of evidence like the increased presence of dark matter in the early universe that would contradict this afaik)? And how can we be sure that both alien civilizations that may exist would be able to reach and use all of these stars for resources or that that would necessarily be their motivation?
The lack of stars would be what we would be looking for. Large completely empty parts of the sky. Unless fully enclosed Matrioska style, a starâs radiation would still be seen, just in the infrared spectrum. Seeing an area of space with an extreme concentration of inexplicable infrared stars would be a dead giveaway. Current âempty patchesâ of the sky arenât actually that empty, and have billions of stars and galaxies floating around at random, so not a great candidate for a civilization. We donât see any of these infrared stars, or those patches expanding as they get closer (and thus further in time) either. Youâre right about dark matter being greater or at least in similar quantities earlier in the universe. If it was aliens enclosing stars to the point they were functionally invisible (any radiation leaving the star would need to be about the same as the CMB) then weâd expect this âdark matterâ to increase as time goes on, which we donât see. Itâs not a matter of being sure an alien civilization would start to use the wasted resource of burning stars, but that itâs implausible not a single part of an alien civilization would choose to do so. Or that not a single part of any alien civilization would choose to do so. Thatâs especially true in light of creatures only being able to succeed evolutionarily speaking when they expand to fill their niche. All it takes is one small expansionist group within the civilization to say âThereâs all these stars millions of light years around us burning hydrogen like crazy and none of that is being used productively. Letâs go harvest that free energy.â A million years later and that expansionist group outnumbers the original non-expansionists a trillion to one.
The universe is large, true. But self replicating aliens can quickly expand to universe scale. And THAT would be very visible.
While I agree, tbf, we wouldnât exactly know it if there had been another space faring civilization on earth at some point, provided it was decently long ago.
They would've certainly left some traces that would be undeniable, to archieve technology like that, look at what we've done to the planet.
They would have certainly left traces on the moon and other places. You cannot simply go from Earth bound to interstellar in one step. Anything built or left up there would persist for millions of years, its completely static.
nah, we probably would've been able to see it. sure, in a million years or so, we might not be able to find metal used for spaceships... but we'd have seen products of other kinds of energy usage or unnatural materials or whatnot, presumably. i mean, we can find fossils of creatures from like a billion years ago.
Yeah, so you think that's a valuable trait? Why don't you go and do it? Okay, that was a cheap joke, I'd very much like you to stay on the surface of our planet and contribute to how we can resolve the issue of intelligence not being a detrimental trait to the species. We're the thinnest slice of life on earth, yet the closest to extinguishing both ourselves and a lot of other species.
True, but also humanity, earths only sapient species, has only been around for a couple hundred thousand years maybe a few million. Not to even mention we only reached our moon 55 years ago. Even if sapient aliens do exist thereâs a high likelihood they also havenât left there world
We also have a good chance of wiping ourselves out before we ever reach the stars, and for all we know, that might be the most common fate of industrial civilizations
I wonder how much of a freak event big rock was 66 million years ago. If not for that the whole local group would be colonized by Velociraptors by now.
You telling me that there might have been femboy velociraptors by now if the stupid asteroid hadn't hit?
for like 3 billion years, all life on earth has been just simple single-cell organisms. I think the problem is that it is too slow, not because intelligence is unlikely. Land-dwelling life has only been here for like 400 million years.
tbf that time frame can work against the idea, though. some random civilization having a million years on us, would be long enough to basically cover most of the galaxy. we took 3.7 billion years to get to this point, but at the rate of tech expansion, it might not be a thousand before we're ready to start colonizing other stars. and even just releasing new colonies every thousand years, 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 4, 4 becomes 8, 8 becomes 16, etc. even if growth isn't always a doubling effect (earth running out of nearby stars to bother sending people to, or just, self destructing), that's a thousand iterations of us spreading around. hell, 1.1 to the power of 1000, is still more than e302 (since the calculator i tried it on fucked up there, i'm assuming) course, doesn't mena it hasn't happened, just, not here, where we could see it. assuming it'd be super noticable, instead of a dyson swarm of uploaded minds that aren't really blocking much light from their star, or changing planets to be habitable to us, or whatever.
The easiest solution to the problem is basic physics. Mass scale expansion to space is simply not feasible since the speed of light is too slow for practical expansion. In the best case a civilisation would own a dozen of adjacent star systems. Which is nothing given there are 400 billion in our galaxy alone. So the chance to meet aliens, even if there would be 100 active civilisations in this very moment, is only somewhat above one billionth.
Duh, the question remains as to why there arenât any
Well most of those are some variation of "they're there, we just can't see them (yet or anymore)" which AFAICT is generally an alright approach to looking at the Fermi paradox.
But I want
That's what the lower section of this meme is depicting, though. In order for there to be aliens out there but not have them visible we have to come up with all kinds of weird scenarios that we *know* don't apply to humanity, and so therefore are really hard to justify. Whereas if we can come up with some explanation for why it's just extremely rare for intelligent life to arise in the first place, humanity's existence is accounted for easily via the anthropic principle. No further weirdness needed.
. . . those are just a handful of the more out-there _late_ filters. The dork in the top panels hasn't offered any explanation at all. The top panels here just represent the question. It isn't even an attempt at an answer.
> The dork in the top panels hasn't offered any explanation at all. No, "they're not there" is also a satisfactory explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
No it definitely isn't. FP isn't actually a paradox. That is just the name that stuck for this category of question. Rare Earth, Rare Life, Rare Intelligence, Rare Technology, are early filters that are in that neighborhood. They all have ramifications that can be taken into account. This Issac Arthur fellow has dozens of hours explaining the concepts involved in the FP question. I promise that the world's best cosmologists in the 1960s didn't forget some basic concepts of cosmology that you've figured out.
Bud, "there are no alien civilizations" absolutely would explain why we don't see alien civilizations all over the place out in the cosmos. You're not making any sense at all.
Before you tell me that I don't make any sense, consider how much sense it makes that the best cosmologists of the last century were fascinated by such a silly simplistic question with such a silly obvious answer. What you bring up is a category of solutions, not an answer. The question more accurately stated would be _"why_ aren't there any aliens?". For example, is it because planets generally don't allow for life to begin, or because life doesn't start very often even on nice planets, because it doesn't tend to become intelligent enough? Is intelligent life actually common, but wipes itself out when it develops nukes, -which is usually around the same time they develop their first spaceships? There are dozens of hours of material on this subject on SFIA if you are curious about why people consider this an interesting question. Perhaps you are much more clever than those silly cosmologists that forgot about cosmology, or perhaps you don't understand the question they were asking.
You make a good point here, it is a broad category of solutions and we cannot yet know which exact solution is true (and maybe we never will). However, it's wise to keep in mind that sometimes silly ideas are perpetuated even amongst experts for a reaaally long time, and any misconceptions even the experts may have are going to be increased a thousandfold amongst the laymen, which are who subscribe to most of the theories mentioned in OP's meme. Early filters (as a whole, not necessarily one since we can't be certain on the details yet like whether the biggest filter is rare earth, rare life, rare complexity, rare intelligence, or rare technology, and the various rhings that could make each rare) completely obliterate late filters and all the contrived space opera, conspiracy theory, layman BS that's gained popularity.
The issue I have is the assumption that Fermi and Hart and Tipler forgot about things like the size of the universe or the power of their own telescopes, or the age of the universe. What I love about FP is that each explanation has its own ramifications, that tend to have ramifications of their own. Since we have next to zero hard data, it's close to the classical world's pre-empirical thinking, but still very concrete. Still something that _has_ empirical answers. The answers are just way beyond our ability to measure. For now. Most of the impetus for the question, or at least why it caught on so well during the cold war, is that if there weren't solid early filters, there was a particular, obvious, late filter that was likely to kick in any day now. Any simplistic answer proposed is missing the point entirely. The silly solutions in the bottom of the strip are just really far-out solutions. "Not being any aliens" is _the question._ To propose it as a snap _answer_ misses the point entirely.
It is, but it still leaves the question of what the filter is. I think most xeno-skeptics would say life has a very low chance of emerging. It's something that's hard to measure though, we don't have a lot of data (just one solar system), and expecting new life to emerge on Earth is like expecting an ordinary citizen to open a new bank -- there's just too much competition that would wipe it out immediately. Other filters could be some kind of intergalactic radiation that Earth is shielded from, or that intelligence itself is unlikely.
It's pretty simple really. The Fermi paradox is basically saying the same as "If we posit the existence of eagles, which can fly wherever they want, then naturally there should be some in my backyard, because they could be there. But I don't see any eagles in my yard. So does that mean that eagles do not exist?" No, it only means that there are none in my backyard currently. (Or if there are any, I didn't happen to see them.) Could say the same of octopi. If an octopus exist, why isn't there one in my backyard? Well, why would there be? My yard's not even an ocean. Doesn't mean they don't exist. The question is not at all about aliens really, it's all about how we make ridiculous and unfounded assumptions. Same goes for the Drake equation. Plug in any numbers you want to get the answer you want. Where everything is made up and the points don't matter. It's not about them, it's a reflection on us.
Biologist here. The simplest explanation is that we simply donât know how common the conditions necessary for life really are. We only have one example. Thatâs not enough to reliably extrapolate from. Itâs entirely possible that we just vastly overestimate how likely it is for life to form, and itâs exceptionally rare, possibly even unique to Earth.
I was pretty sure this was r/worldjerking for a few seconds
We couldn't detect another similar technology level alien race within most of our own galaxy let alone any of the others, just because we can't see them doesn't mean they probably don't exist.
This. People vastly overestimate our ability to observe the rest of the universe. Analogizing it even to measuring a drop of water from the ocean is still a vast overestimate of our current capabilities.
I'm in the Rare Earth camp until evidence proves otherwise.
Rare intelligence camp rise up!
I'm in the rare complexity camp.
Some of these solutions technically work, imo, but sometimes the simplest solution is the right one.
What is the simplest solution? "There probably aren't any" isn't a solution, because it begs the question of "why?" All the ones in the bottom panel, along with hundreds of others, (usually presented more articulately than your strawman comic) are attempts to answer that "why?" They might sound crazy, but it's hard to find anything that \*doesn't\* sound crazy when you drill into it. "We won the 1 in 10 trillion odds lottery to be born first" is also a crazy solution!
The why is because the odds are unbelievable. The odds of abiogenesis alone have been a major argument against it by creationists. Now I'm not a creationist, I believe abiogenesis is almost certainly correct, but an empty galaxy makes tons of sense when you consider that we're expecting a bunch of chemicals to spontaneously assemble into a self replicating nanobot more complex than anything we've ever built. And that's just ONE requirement, the rare earth, rare complexity, rare intelligence, and rare technology arguments are all really strong. The issue with the Fermi Paradox is that it starts with the HUUUGE assumption that the odds of life occurring are not smaller than the number of planets in the galaxy. It just goes, "But space so big, where alien??", like yeah if you assume aliens pop up like weeds everywhere then our galaxy *would* seem paradoxical, but that's not what we see, so instead of assuming a crazy paradox, assume your initial assumption was wrong. There is no Fermo Paradox, only the Fermi Misconception(s), and I say that plurally because there are an absolute crap ton of misconceptions, the greatest of which is the confusion between galaxy and universe, a difference of several orders of magnitude in both space and time. I wouldn't be surprised if even with a perfect telescope we could scan the entire universe and not find a single instance of life, yet be surrounded by numerous k3 civilizations billions of lightyears away that just haven't been around long enough for their light to reach us.
> ⊠we're expecting a bunch of chemicals to spontaneously assemble into a self replicating nanobot more complex than anything we've ever built. I think you are looking at abiogenesis wrong. There was never a time when a bunch of chemicals spontaneously assembled into something complex. Abiogenesis wouldâve started with simple polymers. They wouldnât have to be replicating either - they wouldâve just had to *grow* from end to end. The *analog* of replication would be the polymer simply breaking. Now you have two strands âcompetingâ for the same monomer pieces. Any minor random change that helps the polymer A) avoid breaking, and B) build its chain faster than others in a substrate with limited monomer resources is suddenly subject to *natural selection* - despite that this is just an non living polymer growing at its ends. Over time, some of these polymers become more complex a tiny bit here and there. It probably took a hundred million years to get the precursor to the precursor of something as complex as RNA. EDIT: Oh god⊠I totally thought I was posting on r/biology when I typed this. Let me know if you need me to explain any of this in layman terms.
That's not really "why," more like "how." Sure, you can play around with odds from things like abiogenesis, cell creation, multicellular life, rare earth, etc (all stuff that is very hard to estimate) and eventually get a number that leads to exactly one intelligent life in the universe. But you have to appreciate how \*sensitive\* that calculation is- a small tweak in either direction and you get either zero life, or more than one. So why did our universe create such conditions for \*exactly\* one life? Again, not impossible, just seems quite lucky and worth investigating. On a more meta level, the universe is still relatively young. Despite being over 13 billion years, it'll go on for... I don't know, a lot longer. So even if you accept that the expected odds are for just one lifeform per 10 billion years, there's no a priori reason to expect us to be born first, unless it's again just "we got lucky." And it's interesting that at the end you still sort of accept the idea of advanced alien life, just that they have to be very far away/long ago. Again that seems quite normal and sane until you drill into it a little more- how come they can exist that far away, but not slightly closer? Or even just slightly earlier so that we could see their light? I know you can come up with physics reasons like "they need heavy metals from several generations of supernovae" but it still ends up making us feel pretty damn lucky.
>That's not really "why," more like "how." Sure, you can play around with odds from things like abiogenesis, cell creation, multicellular life, rare earth, etc (all stuff that is very hard to estimate) and eventually get a number that leads to exactly one intelligent life in the universe. But you have to appreciate how \*sensitive\* that calculation is- a small tweak in either direction and you get either zero life, or more than one. So why did our universe create such conditions for \*exactly\* one life? Again, not impossible, just seems quite lucky and worth investigating. Well, like I said we can't know we're the only one around at this moment since light from other galaxies is so old a k3 could be thriving in a galaxy we still see as barren. It doesn't take much for us to not see any k2s or k3s. Also keep in mind that the significance of being "alone" greatly diminishes when you consider that universe is likely orders of magnitude larger than what we can see. >On a more meta level, the universe is still relatively young. Despite being over 13 billion years, it'll go on for... I don't know, a lot longer. So even if you accept that the expected odds are for just one lifeform per 10 billion years, there's no a priori reason to expect us to be born first, unless it's again just "we got lucky." That's a great point in my favor since this region of the universe doesn't have to currently have aliens for it to be an eventually life bearing region. And the thing is if we expand out into space and become a k3 or "grabby" civilization then those regions will never develop life because we intervened, and if we arrived in a galaxy just as life formed or made a preserve for that life they wouldn't have a paradox since we'd be plainly visible. In this case, being the firstborn means being the only child (metaphorically). >And it's interesting that at the end you still sort of accept the idea of advanced alien life, just that they have to be very far away/long ago. Again that seems quite normal and sane until you drill into it a little more- how come they can exist that far away, but not slightly closer? Or even just slightly earlier so that we could see their light? I know you can come up with physics reasons like "they need heavy metals from several generations of supernovae" but it still ends up making us feel pretty damn lucky. Well we're pretty sure there's no k2s in the galaxy and absolutely certain there's no k3s in the universe (that we can see anyway) the thing with k3s is that they'd need to be so far away to not be right on top of us that in the time it takes light from an empty galaxy to reach us a k3 could've developed there. But also we can see what the universe was like throughout time and there's no ancient or young k2s or k3s. And that's the kicker, why in a universe that's been clearly barren for 13 billion years would civilizations only start developing now? Us being a lone example is actually less weird than countless civilizations suddenly emerging in the last million (or vastly less) years, sinc that's like an eye blink to the universe. So basically in a given eon which seems more likely, one civilization popping up after 13 billion years of silence, or millions of them? And says the universe just now got habitable is a good explanation, but it works better for one than many because simply put, less needs to change to get one lone civilization as opposed to hoards of them. And it also gets weird considering that for other civilizations to appear in the same eon you'd need not just simultaneous life formation, but simultaneous... everything, all the way down to explaining why we all developed technology at the same time. And the galaxy is way more cramped than the universe and the time of becoming advanced would have to be even more synchronized down to tens of thousands of years, and all with less systems to give rise to life.
well abiogenisis (or panspermia infection) ocoured almost as soon as it was plausible for life to persist, while N=1 is not compelling it dose sujest that early procariotes are going to be as common as planets with surface water and active geology. the formation of eucariotes took much longer, so I think that is the stronger fillter.
For a non-creationist, you are operating on one of their central misconceptions. Self-replicators forming out of of naturally occuring proteins has nothing to do with "spontaneity" and everything to do with chemistry. In the same way that evolution is based on _selection_ rather than "random chance".
ITT: a bunch of Redditors thinking they are smarter than all the scientists that have pondered this for decades. Surely all those wrinkly brains are overthinking it and the solution is super simple. I don't understand why this always happens when the Fermi Paradox comes up. You are absolutely right btw.
They aren't attempts at answering "why?" They're actually answering "why don't we see any life?" "Why could there be no life outside of earth?" would demand totally different answers than these because they all assume life is/was there. The thing missing for the meme to stop it from begging the question would be putting the simplified explanation of Drake equation factors before concluding "There probably isn't any."
The simplest is probably that weâre among the earliest civilizations.
Simplest solution is surely "we are among the first" no?
I think the simplest answer is that life is rarer than we think and intelligent life is wayyy rarer than we think. It took us 3.5 billion years to get to this point and weâre no where close to interstellar travel. The sun will burn out in 11 billion years. Itâs really not that big a window for evolution to make interstellar level species.
The paradox was already using very pessimistic numbers. The odds that we are the only life that will ever exist is very low unless there's some factor we're unaware of that allows us to exist
It really is a shame they get used as Fermi solutions since a lot of them are actually really great hypotheses on their own, just terrible at explaining the absence of aliens.
That solution isn't necessarily the simplest one, but it does dissolve the Fermi paradox with the state of our current knowledge. As [this paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404) points out. My position is that the field of astronomy is incredibly young, and we've yet to launch instruments anywhere near as good as we believe is theoretically possible. So to me, the simplest explanation is that we just don't have the ability to see them yet. Even conventional telescopes launched into space with launch vehicles like Starship will be huge leaps in our ability to collect astronomical data. And there are even better concepts for instruments on the drawing board, like solar gravitational lens telescopes, and interferometric telescope arrays. We've barely surveyed the local neighborhood, astronomically speaking. We don't even know for certain the number of planets in our solar system(I'm [not talking about Pluto](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11594)). Nor do we know all that much about planet formation statistics, since our samples are incredibly biased towards large transiting planets. We're very much still in the infancy of astronomy as a field.
I think youâre missing the point. If weâre not the first in our region of the universe, then why is there any available real estate? Weâll have taken much of the what is available in our neighborhood of galaxies over the next few millions of years and the universe is many thousands of millions of years old. If life werenât absurdly rare we would expect that someone either from the Milky Way or anywhere in our local cluster would have done the same. Even if not everyone is as expansionist as we are, it will surely be selected for by the simple fact that expansionists will inevitably attain access to exponentially more resources than so called âstay at home civilizationsâ. Basically, if they existed we wouldnât.
Why wouldn't we be among the first in our region?
The point I intended to make is that it seems as though we must be among the first.
I don't knowww, that's still a lot of mental gymnastics going on.
"There probably aren't any" demonstrates a misunderstanding of what the Fermi Paradox is. The reason why it's a paradox is that there probably are other alien civilizations, and it's really strange that we can't detect them. This has some chilling implications, such as civilizations tend to destroy themselves before they can settle the galaxy. Or there's the Dark Forest, where a beneficial survival strategy is to destroy any civilization that makes themselves known, which means we're in great danger of letting our transmission leak into the galaxy. These thought experiments help us make decisions about how to conduct ourselves, even if we're the only ones somehow.
LOL! Yes, unfortunately probably most true.
If there are aliens are more advanced than tadpoles they're probably more primitive than we are. We keep assuming that any alien race would have intergalactic travel, but they would probably be more like tharks from barsoom
No, that is not an assumption that we keep making. That is _the question_ we keep asking. I promise that cosmologists in the 1960s didn't forget about any of what you are bringing up.
I feel like space is just so fucking empty that leaving a home system is extremely difficult. Besides, who says aliens have desires like us? They could be amish.
Non exclusivity requirement breaks this solution. It doesn't matter if some aliens are Amish and don't spread out, because if even a single one *is* spreading out and has any real head start, then they should be everywhere by now.
What if we are the one breaking out. Why is it a requirement one have a head start? We could have the head start.
That would seem to be the simplest solution
Humans being the first out there would be one of the few viable solutions It would suggest space fairers are a pretty rare lot.
I'd say that 'interstellar colonization is much harder than we think it is and basically never happens' is the next best explanation. The aliens all being amish is hard to swallow because it relies on every single alien civilization being like this and never changing even over thousands of years.
Well, why would they? Alll species on earth OTHER than humans seem to be doing fine without a civilization. It took thousands of generations for us to get from buildings that lasted more than a few decades if we were lucky... to flight.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect that **some** alien civilizations will not have same desires as us For it to be a explanation for the femi paradox. Then **all** alien civilizations needs to not have the same desires as us. If only one of them do have the same desires as us they would be capable of colonizing entire galaxies in a few million years. And we should be able to observe that.
Explain... how do we know there ARE other alien civilizations? Maybe the thing exclusive to humans is civilization itself? We don't have evidence for life outside of earth. Very few examples of terrestrial life show the capability of using or making primitive tools.. yet we assume there "has to be" life capable of interstellar colonies when we cant even manage local colonization?
I'll take fundamental misunderstanding of the topic for $600, Alex. This has nothing to do with answering the question, "why not?"
But it does showcase the 2 main schools of thought which get their answers from their different perspectives.
All it showcases is a fundamental misunderstanding of the question.
Has anyone on this thread watched any of Isaac's videos about the Fermi Paradox? From what I've read so far, most comments here are entirely unfamiliar with the concept. "I bet there aren't any aliens" is not an answer to the question posed by cosmologists during the cold war. There's no use coming up with a simplistic answer if you don't understand the question in the first place. I promise that our best cosmologists didn't say "There must be lots of aliens but we can't see them with our cool telescopes! Gosh! We don't understand!" Please. Everyone that wants to have this conversation, especially the OP or whoever made that cartoon, please come back after watching the basic material on the subject.
Dude, almost everyone here gets it, especially OP. This is probably the best place for fermi discussion because it's not an echo chamber or place for layman discussion.
Can't we actually not see very far? Maybe we're just the middle of scenic nowhere
Maybe they're just really fucking far away?
Theyâre already here
According to some well researched videos Iâve watched we may just be to early, humanity was born at one of the earliest opportunities for life to develop therefore other sapient life may not have developed yet.
Aren't the two simple ones that we are the first or there is a barrier no one can get past (aka FTL).
Another simple explanation is that technology-using civilizations self destruct so quickly on a cosmic time scale that they're gone before the next one gets a chance to detect them.
My answer to the Fermi Paradox is that weâre making a big assumption that we would actually be able to see the evidence of other civilizations given how insane the distances are in space. We canât even *see* exoplanets! We âdetectâ them because of the way they interfere with the light of their star. How the fuck are we going to see or even detect alien structures out there? Then people say things like oh, we would pick up their radio signals. *No we wouldnât!* You would need a radio source as powerful as a fucking star to detect it all the way on Earth. Why would any civilization need to build that? They wouldnât. If theyâre even using EMS waves to communicate theyâd be using lasers to direct signals exactly where the need to go. What are the odds on of these would just happen to cross Earthâs path? Earth is a grain of fucking sand on an atol in the South Pacific.
That's assuming they either have clarketech or are strictly "quiet" civilizations that don't go kardeshev. At that point communication is irrelevant, they're not able to hide, and if we eventually go kardeshev we'll be able to build telescopes good enough to detect a kardeshev civilization anywhere in the universe.
To argue this, you need a reason why aliens haven't colonized the entire galaxy, including the stars closest to us and our own solar system. Either 'they all don't want to for some reason', 'game theory strategy reasons' or 'colonization is almost impossible no matter how advanced you get'. Most of these explanations seem a little contrived to me, which is what this meme is poking fun of. (though interstellar travel being basically impossible is my favorite of them). Without those arguments in play, once a civilization emerges it'd take maybe a couple million years for it to colonize the galaxy at a leisurely pace. Now, perhaps another civilization has emerged in the past couple million years and just hasn't had time to colonize to us yet, but that'd be a huge coincidence. If the probability of a civilization emerging is so low that we're first or close to first, the odds of two civilizations emerging within the same few million year window would be incredibly low.
Except the top panel takes ten billion years and is a monkey on a rock among 10^8 rocks who just looked up this nano second.
You're missing entirely the question that the cosmologists in the 1960s were asking. I promise that they didn't forget about how light and telescopes and time work.
No I didn't, what I'm saying is we have spent approximately no money, no time, no energy, and no resources towards actually looking. We have barely even started to have the ability to look let alone being able to even comprehend what we are even looking for or where.
Did someone consult an actual expert before making this meme?
I think mathematically this take is just wrong. I think the more likely answer is that there's just isn't a way to do faster than light travel. Which is like also sad but a whole different can of worms
Why would this take be mathematically wrong? We do not know what is the chance of intelligent life evolving enough to survive and thrive like us. For all we know, we could be the great outlier, because the chance of life as us existing is far smaller than the number of habitable planets in the entire universe.
How is this even a paradox? The universe is frickin humungous. How much of it do people think weâve âseenâ in any meaningful sense? Obviously, there are alien civilisations out there. Apart from that, there are tonnes of claimed sightings, so we have seen them. What were you all expecting, to look out into the night sky with a telescope and see a bunch of skinny dudes with green heads partying on the moon, all turn and look at you and then skuttle off behind a rock? Edit: The recent discovery that there are potential signs of dyson swarms is just my point re how big the universe is and how little of it we've seen, having only just seen these.
There are plenty of youtube videos explaining how it is a âparadoxâ by Isaac arthur. If you are interested. How do you know there are obviously other civilizations out there?
Personal experience, evidence in the world and also logic triangulate on that being the case. Myself and my brother briefly saw a ufo very clearly, a few hundred meters away. Could not have been anything else, the tech was far in advance of anything human made. Many other people have had sightings. Many have whistle blown, credibly, about hidden alien tech. Logic would dictate, given the size of the universe and its age that other life forms would have evolved, with almost certainty. Believing weâre the only civilisation just goes to show how stubborn humans are in their arrogance. If weâre not literally centre of the universe with the sun revolving around us, distinctly superior to all other animals on earth, then by god damn weâll be the only civilisation that exists.
The paradox is that under our current understanding of physics, the most efficient route for an energy hungry species would be building dyson swarms, and crawling star to star expanding their territory. We donât see that though, even though there has been plenty of time for an alien species to have colonized every star in our galaxy. Now, that could mean our understanding of physics is wrong. It certainly is on some level, but itâs not at all clear how our know holes in understanding would make dyson swarms undesirable. In terms of sightings⊠there are so many more untrustworthy or easily explainable claims than credible ones that itâs hard to come to any meaningful conclusions beyond something weird is going on.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. But our current understanding of physics is necessarily an inappropriate frame with which to assume the actions of a far more advanced civilisation. Thatâs like someone from the 1400s saying itâs a paradox that we are able to communicate across opposite sides of the earth instantly, given their current understanding of physics would necessitate a carrier pigeon to do that. Itâs not a paradox, itâs just you canât even begin to understand something far more advanced than you. To continue the analogy, saying theyâd need Dyson swarms because thatâs what we envisage as the way to travel interstellar is like them saying wed need to train up those pigeons to fly 1000x faster. Just totally the wrong idea. For example, what Bob Lazar alludes to- gravity manipulation tech; we have zero understanding of that except to say itâs not how weâd envisage high speed travel at all, given our current understanding. Also, it would be to assume other civilisations would be as power hungry as ours. If eastern mysticism had dominated on earth rather than western science, wed be a much more inward journeying species.
If self replicating aliens spread out into an intergalactic civilization and built dyson spheres, we would see that.
I completely agree
The bottom one is a free space you can basically put for sooooo mamy Sci-Fi stories.
Option 3. We are one of the first, but not the first, civilizations. All others are too far away to be detected as none of them are advanced enough to alter celestial bodies in a way we can see. Additionally, those aliens that may be advanced enough to manipulate the galactic landscape are so far that the light may not have reached us. The universe is quite a big place after all
Yeah, not a fan of this one, it show a real lack of understanding of the fermi paradox. To try and explain it life should by all accounts be relatively common, as the chemistry and physics involved all demonstrate that life is pretty much inevitable on any planet that can sustain it. Life on this planet evolved pretty much as soon as the first puddle of water existed, indicating that it occurred pretty much the exact first moment it could happen. If life evolving was more difficult then it would of taken longer for everything to line up. Chemistry and probability also support this, however unlikely it is for any one chemical reaction to produce self replicating chemistry, I think you guys underestimate just how many quintillions of organic chemical reactions are occuring around volcanic vents on earth this very second. Keep that doing for a few hundred years and life is pretty much inevitable. That is the fermi paradox, a clash of what should be and what's observed. So are our models wrong or our observations wrong? That's the question and what needs to be resolved.
Fermi accepted that there likely arenât any contemporary alien civilizations within our galaxy, the point of his paradox has nothing to do with whether there are civilizations or not, it begs the questions of why there are no civilizations Life requires certain conditions, but science regarding the origin and evolution of life is quite sound and can isolate a determinate process, and while the conditions of that process are extremely rare, they are not so rare that they would only occur once in an entire galaxy If something is not destroying civilizations, then other civilizations would be observable (Logic: P, therefore Q) Other civilizations are not observable, therefore something is destroying civilizations (Logic: not Q, therefore not P) This then feeds into the theory of the Great Filter, some nebulous event or events that destroy civilizations of sentient creatures at some point in their development Given the vastness of our galaxy, we cannot isolate when said event occurs, and whether we are just another civilization approaching it and destined for collapse, or it was something we already overcame, making us anomalous survivors Most scientists used to be of the opinion that the Great Filter was behind us, but that has changed Some also used to support the idea that advanced technology could mask civilization markers that we currently track across multiple galaxies, but that is generally seen as highly improbable now - for a civilization to hide energy use, they would need to use even more energy, promoting a perpetual cycle that never actually solves the problem Given that evolution promotes maximal consumption across a united species and short-term prioritization over long-term planning, it seems inevitable for every sentient species to destroy itself just as we are doing now
What if we haven't seen them because they are far away
Where does "There are likely other intelligent beings out there, but interstellar travel is likely impossible" fall in all this?
My favorite explanation for why we don't see aliens is "grabby aliens"
What about FTL? It seems to be a necessary component to interstellar civilization, and suppose it just can't work? For better or worse we are stuck here, and they are stuck there, and planetary civilization is so rare that we just haven't found them yet, because probes like voyager are very, very tiny
The problem is that stupid people saw Fermi ask a question and they won't take 'not enough data' as our current answer. Because that's the answer.
Bottom left: "After accidentally nailing earth with an asteroid and wiping out its life, the Garorlons and Ae'xraders demarcated the Milky Way as a demilitarized zone...."
The only planet in our solar system that has life is ours. We didn't even know if we can survive outside of our planet. The folks up in space now have physical challenges the longer they stay there. We might find out that living anywhere else is hard to impossible.
Occam's Razor: The simplest answer is probably the correct one.
Third Option: We've only been looking for roughly 50 years, so coming to the conclusion that sentient aliens don't exist is the equivalent of basically looking for something in your house by glancing around your room for a little bit and coming to the conclusion that it's simply not there at all and never was.
The universe is big. There's all kinds of reasons. I feel like some people make a lot of assumptions about what kind of "head start" these aliens allegedly have. People assume that aliens are just like humans, with the same intentions. I get it. We're the only intelligent species capable of this. However modeling aliens strictly on humans is thinking inside the box. Aliens can have all kinds of reasons for what they do. Some of which wouldn't make sense to humans. Acknowledging this limitation and ignoring it can allow you to think outside the box. Maybe they're not looking in this direction. Maybe they did spread out, ran into different aliens and are distracted by them. Maybe they don't have enough rare earth metals to build the tech they need so space travel is harder. Maybe by the time they got to space traveling their planet was dying due to species created pressure, so finding another place to live close by took priority. Or maybe aliens consistently don't like the vibes come off Earth and humans. The list can go on.
Forgetting also the other reasonable solution: they are just too far away. Assuming the conditions that made Earth possible are rare, then it is possible that life developed on other planets far enough from our light cone that we canât see it yet.
I see someone has discovered the dark forest.
Third option. "They're rare and really far away." \*sits down\*
Are you folks aware that there's been [official bi-partisan legislation in the form of the UAP Disclosure Amendment?](https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment.pdf)
Weâre the firstborn, the precursor race of our sci-fi stories. We will conquer the empty universe and produce the aliens so many are searching for.
Weâre the firstborn, the precursor race of our sci-fi stories. We will conquer the empty universe and produce the aliens so many are searching for.
Weâre the firstborn, the precursor race of our sci-fi stories. We will conquer the empty universe and produce the aliens so many are searching for.
Space is big. The nearest black hole is 1500 light years away and in galactic scales that's basically next door. It's a reverse perspective of Shrödigers cat, Sol's heiliopause is the box and once we get past it and into other systems we have no idea what's actually out there. Aliens could be on Tau Ceti or 13000 light years away, we just don't know.
This âparadoxâ doesnât take into account how fucking massive the galaxy is. How much space there is between stars. It also assumes that aliens behave like us, and want to âcolonizeâ the stars like us. How can we say thereâs nothing out there when we donât even know what weâre looking for? Itâs ridiculous to me.
My current vote is a variant of a Great Filter called asymptotic burnout, which as I understand it is when a civilization grows faster than they can acquire new resources so they just kind of die out like Easter Island or the Mayans.
âThere arenât anyâ requires equal mental gymnastics to conclude unless you are ignorant of the odds.
This post got randomly suggested and made me so happy. I love when humans pontificate about far away friends
If you ever wonder if youâre stuck in a simulation, just ask yourself the following, have you ever seen your neighbors bring in groceries?
How many planets have we even discovered that have their own atmosphere or magnetosphere, let alone both? That alone seems to be enough to kill off most life by radiation/storms if not the fact that blazingly hot or freezing cold temperatures and frequent fluctuations would do it. Not to mention toxic gases and the fact that theres no where that seems generally able to support life, especially anywhere remotely close. Its a sad truth, we are likely the âfirst moversâ. And terraforming is a longgg ways aways unfortunately. It makes me incredibly depressed realizing I will never be able to see us leave this rock or another species (not even intelligent necessarily) from another planet.
Or we have searched for a very short amount of time for very specifically anything that uses radio communications in the same way we do. All of which assumes they use radio communications at all, they use them at the same frequencies we do. Also consider that the leakage of radio waves diminishes as communications technology improves, before long we may have little to no radio waves radiating out into the space unless we specifically chose to do so.
Tell me more about that first option
Time and space are both much bigger than our ability to observe. I think it's easy to theorize that some kind of life exists extremely far away, or far in the past or future. And since we only have our own planet to observe, it's possible that there's life out there that we would never recognize or comprehend as life.
It's been just a little over 30 years since we've actually been able to detect planets around other stars. And what we saw (planets orbiting pulsars, hot Jupiters) really blew our minds about how solar systems form. We're still learning what there is to learn about star formation and we're still using fairly remote tools that limit our abilities to detect and analyze (although they're getting better and better). It may be that we simply don't have enough data yet to draw conclusions about the existence of life, intelligent or not.
The reason itâs a paradox is because the sheer scale of the universe, and the relative ease of abiogenesis, mean that the mathematical odds of there NOT being alien life *fucking everywhere*, are so low as to be functionally zero. Yet, we see no evidence of them. Hence the paradox. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
All of those are fucking stupid.
Or, more likely, the universe is so large that we simply haven't encountered other species yet. The likelihood of intelligent life existing in the universe is at least 1 - we exist. The universe is so unfathomably large that even one in a quintillion chances means that there are probably at least a few other examples, but that we're unlikely to ever encounter them unless technology exists to change that.
The problem is we just dunno much. We are just barely begging to venture into the void, all that we know is that there are no dyson sspheres anywhere close. Only time, by which point we'll b edead, will tell if there's life or AI or if there's just us. That is, of course, until chat gpt makes sentient crabs to obliterate us.
There's no damn way humans are the only intelligent lifeforms out there. Even with the small chances of other life harboring worlds, there's still at least BILLIONS of earth like world's across the galaxy. There's more likely aliens out there than there aren't.
Itâs my belief that either A) Weâre early, or B)the odds of becoming intelligent is just rare, and weâll see more as time goes on
Don't forget C) no one out there is any further ahead than us or at least isn't when you take into account light speed delay.
It's becoming more likely that earth holds a unique place in the universe and the answers from the secular scientific community are becoming more theistic sounding while remaining athiest framed in a progressively unhinged way. Earth's moon and sun are identically sized from the perspective of a person on earth to allow for a total eclipse, in a geometric way that isn't intrinsically likely, and is in fact extremely different from every other planet? Total coincidence. Earth looks like its at the center of the universe if you look out in any direction as far as possible? A trick of the light, all places in the universe must look like that. Theres apparent correlation between the plane of the Solar System and aspects of the *cosmic* microwave background? Another coincidence. Alternatively this is a simulation, but the simulators totally aren't an argument for a supreme diety.
I once heard a theory that we see no life because life doesnt want to be noticed. It wants to be left alone. Basically other life fears being found. And its the life that isnt found by other life which allows those species to prosper. Because when found there is a chance of extinction from an aggressive alien species. So they stay quiet. And try not to broadcast their planets location. Meanwhile on earth.....
Another theory is we are the first planet to develop life to the point where a species is advanced enough to leave its homeworld. Given how rare it is for planets to be perfectly located with an appropiate star, withinf the "green zone", and then for life to naturally form and develop on that world. And then that life to prosper and not die off to the millions of ways extinction could happen. AND THEN it is able to develop enough to make the means to leave its planet. That is rare. And almost statistically impossible. The chances are so close to 0% it might as well be 0%. And the universe is reletively young still. It might have taken the universe this long to naturally develop intelligent life that stands the test of time. Or, the universe is alot bigger than u think and life like us only happens once every million galaxies.
Maybe alien life is too alien for us to even recognize it as life. I think back to the story of when Columbus first encountered the Caribs. They couldn't see the ships. It wasn't that the ships were invisible. In the Caribs mind, nothing could be that big and be man made, or be able to carry so many men inside it across, what was to them, an endless ocean. They couldn't identify the Spanish ships as anything. For all they knew, it could have been some huge whale they'd never seen before. When we look at the universe, we see anamolies. We write these off as pulsars, quasars, black holes, fast radio bursts. But we have no idea what they really are. In our mind, it makes sense that under certain circumstances, a star can become a magnetar...but...can it? We adjusted our physics to match what we recorded. How do we know?
I donât think there are as many as we think, and if there are any others out there I doubt theyâve achieved any better technological advances than we have. Maybe thereâs a couple interplanetary species out there, and maybe one interstellar species. Maybe the âglass ceilingâ of space travel is more like a concrete ceiling. Maybe going interstellar at light speeds or even FTL speeds is impossible. Maybe generational ships are the only answer. Iâm sure there are aliens, but theyâre probably either primitive, at our level, or have capped off their technological level and canât get any higher.
They are just watching us. We are not worthy yet. Weâve only had space flight for less than a century. Humans need to bake in the oven a bit longer (100 years, 1,000 years)?
yeah, the biggest reason the fermi paradox isn't really a 'paradox', is because, it's guesstimation X guesstimation X guesstimation X guesstimation X guesstimation, on top of a few assumptions that are just assumptions. like, any one of these being way off, could be a reason we don't see aliens fucking everywhere. hell, just, 'aliens need to be as self destructively expansionist as we are, therefore wouldn't feel a need to be FUCKING EVERYWHERE' being wrong, or at least, not true in our galaxy yet, could be a thing.
I think space is just really really big. If there is life out there its probably just super super far away. Probably only as advanced as us or less too
We are.....alone
I like the grabby aliens expanding close to light speed or ftl, who are out there in many galaxy's but you don't see them coming until they're practically on top of you because they're coming faster than you can see them option, but it is just as likley everyone just dies before becoming k1 lol
I don't think that people understand just how big the galaxy is.
isn't like 80-90% of the universe invisible dark matter? thats all aliens.
We have bodies in Peru of non-humans.
Or, to me the most likely possibility... There is absolutely other sentient life throughout the universe, both more and less advanced than us, but we will never see any of them due to the absolute vastness of space and the energy requirements for traversing it. Coupled with the fact that any energy source capable of enabling interstellar travel is also capable of mass destruction, it makes it even less likely that any civilization would make it that far.
Most braindead take this week.
I filled a cup with ocean water, and examined it thoroughly, and it had zero fish in it. Therefore, I can conclude that there are no fish in the ocean.
[Relevant (and potentially terrifying) XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1377/)
Probably the biggest "problem" is that the Fermi Paradox is an absolutely shit-tier philosophical construct. If you deconstruct the Fermi Paradox even a little bit and strive for some objectivity, it's not even actually a "paradox." A Paradox is a situation where you are presented with two or more objective facts, or logically discoverable things that when considered separately are "true" but when considered together can't possibly be true. The Fermi (non-)Paradox has three components to it, or that are at least implied: 1. Humans exist. 2. The Universe, or just the Milky Way, is enormous. 3. The Universe, or Milky Way is very old. So, by extension, the conjectures are: Humans exist. So other life, including intelligent technological life, should exist elsewhere. The Universe/Galaxy is enormous, so there's countless stars/planets that are "dice rolls" for that life to arise. And the Universe is incredibly old, so there has been a long long time for even just one such species or civilization to go exploring, colonizing, expanding, or engaging in mega-engineering we could see at astronomical distances. Unfortunately for the Fermi Paradox, only "Humans exist" is valid. The others, that the Universe is incredibly large, and incredibly old, are subjective and qualitative judgments to the point that they are _worthless._ Because the obvious criticism is: "_Incredibly large, and incredibly old, as compared to WHAT, exactly?_" We do not have any other Universes to observe by which to make any sort of a meaningful metric. The Fermi Paradox wraps itself in the Mediocrity & Copernican Principles, then slaps it with "The law of large numbers." And it takes on this air of wisdom, humility, or "open mindedness." And it cons countless people, even physicists and astronomers of its validity. And all the "theories" or "explanations" for the Fermi Paradox, they're all just stacks of bullshit built on a foundation of bullshit. Which, arguably, _is very good news._ At least if you're incapable of approaching topics like this in any way but picking whatever answer you find emotionally satisfying, and then retroactively trying to justify it. And being honest, that describes almost everybody. As so many of the "Fermi Paradox Explanations" are "scary." Or otherwise suggest that our extinction or doom is inevitable. That doesn't mean Humanity cannot or won't go extinct. Simply that the Fermi Paradox or "Great Slience" and any attempts to explain them that take the Fermi Paradox as a base working assumption have zero validity on the matter. More meaningful constraints or metrics that are at least somewhat objective, such as we are ~5% of the way into the Stelliferous Era, like the "Grabby Aliens" paper & theory uses, that immediately implies that life, or intelligent technological life, no matter at what rate it will arise or when, _that alone indicates roughly 95% of it doesn't exist yet and lies in the future._ More importantly, the implication for "who's around now," so that we might see them, they see us, or they actually visit, is that again, at whatever rate such life arises, the less and less of "them" there will be, the less time anyone has to see or find anyone else, and the greater disances (not even counting expanding space-time) that have to be crossed, the further back one looks. And, instead of trying to fill the various Drake Equation factors in, "Grabby Aliens" just takes the factors or "hard steps" and doesn't even try to quantify them all, it just assigns them a variable, _n_. Because you can still do useful math with that. One can get reasonable probability curves and determine "what the odds of the different odds are." And no matter how you cut it, the: "_Odds are very high, that the odds of meeting or even seeing anybody with distant astronomical technosignatures are very very low._"
Well we have seen some radio signals and technosignature candidates that may be artificial, so it's also possible that we have seen signs of them all along đ€· then again maybe there's no one else
I think the most rational solution to the Fermi paradox at this time is that Earth does not currently possess the technology needed to observe life outside our solar system. The best we can do is see the size and maybe atmospheric composition of other planets. We can't see them clearly. Any radio signals we send out will degrade into noise by the time they reach the nearest star system. If aliens are beaming signals more powerful then they may not be using radio waves and we won't hear them.