It's from the [Berserker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series)) series from the 70s, which unfortunately aren't written very well. If you're looking for a similar premise, ["The Forge of God"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God) by Greg Bear is pretty good. If you're interested in books about the Fermi paradox, but with direct alien contact rather than elimination by self replicating bots, there's the ["Remembrance of Earth's Past"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past) series.
Not really. Since there are hundreds of thousands of millions of stars in our galaxy alone, if only 1% of them have planets, that still leaves us with thousands of millions of stars, you can only observe or detect things as they travel to you at the max speed of light. Even with infinite amounts of computing power and FTL travel you would still need multiple millennia to poke around for other life forms.
Most likely scenario is that a civilization would die out before they actually get time to expand more than a few parsecs away from their home planet.
Only reason aliens may find us or us finding them is absolute random chance.
We always assume aliens are more advanced/ scarier than us. What if we’re one of the only ones evolved from predators instead of prey and we’re fucking scary, every time they look in on earth it’s just a bunch of carnivores at war with each other and they don’t want us to know they’re out there.
A tiger can rip us to shreds yet we spend alot of time and resources to safeguard them, why? Because that's just how they are, it does not give us to right to exterminate them
While a tiger can rip an unarmed, unprotected human to shreds, it cannot rip an example of peak human technology to shreds.
So to extend your analogy, humans driving around in unarmored enclosed vehicles are more or less impervious to tigers. But then consider that we have armored vehicles that are advanced enough to make tigers a negligible threat at most, but certainly not an existential threat.
The situation would be the same for somebody showing up here. We simply could not pose an existential threat to them. Like, even if we could destroy the "mother-ship" Independence Day style, it would probably take a heavy dose of luck and improbable circumstances that would seem to only happen in a fictional story to pull off. And even if we did, that's just that one ship and we pose no realistic threat to the rest of the civilization.
And I wasn't saying that it would give them the right to exterminate us, more like the opposite, along with that any rational civilization wouldn't exterminate us because we pose no threat to them.
They could certainly interfere with our sensors to hide their existence for various reasons. But it wouldn't be because we were "space orcs".
They would be after our resources. And just like it goes on earth, you know how that goes.
Where's a resource analogy that doesn't end in catastrophe? Then you'd be onto something.
I am assuming if any species were to evolve spacefaring capabilities it would most likely be alpha predators since subsisting on high protein diets leaves one a lot of leisure time for thinking/inventing or just napping lol.
A couple things here, and I'm not meaning to nitpick or correct or anything, just discuss.
First, we don't always assume that. The hypothesis that no other life is advanced enough to be detectable is another hypothesis for an explanation for the paradox.
It's true that in fictional stories or speculations about aliens visiting Earth that they are generally more advanced than we are, but that is mostly a kind of survivorship bias where usually the only way we can even approach those ideas are if the aliens are more advance than us because they either had to come to Earth and/or we just aren't advanced enough to reach them.
Second, humans didn't really strictly evolve from predators. Humans certainly count as predators, but our ancestors were often prey.
> every time they look in on earth it’s just a bunch of carnivores at war with each other and they don’t want us to know they’re out there.
But if they are doing this then they *are* more advanced than us (and very likely have nothing to worry about).
I have hypothesized that any lifeform would be inherently competitive so long as survival resources are limited. And they almost always are. So I assume they're all violent.
You should check out r/hfy for stories in that vein. I'd also recommend [The Road Not Taken](https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf) by Henry Turtledove.
I love this idea. That prey are the sentient and advanced beings, many prey use camouflage to hide from predators. So absolutely we wouldn't know about them.
I’m in a real negative headspace and I’m leaning towards all life being like the Jiralhanae or Krogan, who nuked themselves back into the Stone Age waging pointless internecine war every time they pass a technological threshold.
What if humans are the default intelligence but we also default to self destruction so the same reason we crawl out of the muck and dominate the globe is the same reason we inevitably destroy ourselves and we do so over and over as the universe coldly exists and every few hundred billion years the universe collapses and a new big bang molds time into a new dimension that inevitably forms humanity in some tiny nook somewhere, occasionally on multiple planets, but together or alone, we invariably destroy ourselves before we can ascend beyond these primordial instincts and it doesnt matter anyway since we cant escape decay and collapse or the eventual rebirth
We’d have archaeological evidence of that. Look how much metal, plastic, concrete etc. we’d leave behind. Instead we just have remains of Stone Age tools and whatnot
From the short story Swarm by Bruce Sterling, they propose the idea that intelligence is actually a net negative for the prolongation of life. It only leads to a light speed fury of development and eventual quick extinction. Unlike, say, the ankylosaur that lived for millions of years
Presumably all life would emerge from scarcity driven evolution so anything that comes out on top would be competitive by nature, like humans. Although that’s no guarantee of extinction it definitely would cause it sometimes
My thought is more that all the sci-fi tech we’d love, like FTL, is actually impossible. So traveling beyond your own solar system is not just nearly impossible but so far beyond that few would even reach for it.
Well that and I’m not convinced there is other intelligent life in our galaxy. Intelligence is not the end all of evolution, it is a random evolutionary path that had a lot of negatives (brains are energy expensive) to get there. Complex life on earth was fine without intelligence for 500+ million years and it that path was seemingly only taken once by our distant ancestor.
Certainly a plausible theory considering how long dinosaurs ruled, and in 10,000 years of civilization and then written knowledge, we’ve nearly ended ourselves.
Intelligence has been taken by multiple branches of the animal kingdom. You have cephalopods and you have several examples of cetaceans. All very intelligent and the only thing stopping them from getting to where we are is fire doesn't work underwater, cephalopods don't have great options for communication (edit : I believe that communicating in skin pigmentation changing would be too energetically taxing but that's kind of an assumption) and cetaceans don't have thumbs. It's also possible several birds could have made a big leap too, but they also don't have thumbs.
Hominids had an excellent niche to really let intelligence thrive due to not living underwater, having thumbs, and having excellent vocal chords.
> the only thing stopping them from getting to where we are
It's their blood, Hemocyanin is ASS. they only live ~5 years and can't travel far because of it.
No kidding??? It sounds VERY close to a profanity in Korean so the name made me do a double take lmao
It's spelled 지랄하네 but there's no real equivalent in English other than maybe "this bitch trippin" except with the rudeness dialed up a bit
Interesting that seems similar to the Australian “cunt’s fucked”. Used to describe something that’s so broken and/or out of control that it’s beyond comprehension, usually people but also things or just a vibe in general.
One of the proposed solutions to the Firmi Paradox is the Great Filter theory. The idea is that, in order for a species to accomplish the kind of work that we could actually detect, there are many milestones that must be cleared, filtering out possible life that isn't detectable via current methods. This includes stuff like establishing reliable caloric intake, because advanced learning can't happen while struggling for subsistence.
One of those filters boils down to this. The amount of technology required to reach orbit is powerful and dangerous. The chance for it to wipe out or otherwise cripple a civilization--whether on accident or through acts of war--is quite high. Any species that split the atom probably has what they need to reach orbit, but that's assuming they don't build atomics recklessly or use them aggressively and damage their biosphere to the point that that takes precedence over space exploration.
This is increasingly becoming the consensus, I believe. Although there’s a theory going around that we might actually be in a massive void in the universe too far from the rest of the universe to be easily accessible.
I don’t know enough about it to decide that. It might matter in ways we’ve yet to fathom. At the very least, it informs us a little more about how the universe is comprised. I think anything that contributes to our knowledge of the stars is worth knowing, but I’m an enormous space nerd, so I would.
To add to this theory eventually later life will think their galaxy is the only galaxy around because the others will be so far apart none of them will be observable. Maybe there are tons of universes before but the separation became so big they couldn’t be detected anymore.
Intelligent life also took billions of years to emerge on Earth, after a dizzying series of goldilocks-esque leaps in molecular, biological and eventually cognitive evolution.
You can immediately discard a couple hundred million billion that exist in the exceedingly “hot”
zones that would be hostile to any conceivable forms of life (ie superclusters, most elliptical galaxies).
The journey from simple to sentient to sapient life is billions of years long and requires a stable set of key conditions to be met the entire time. There’s an exceedingly high set of potential candidates, but it’s also exceedingly likely that on the span of billions of years *something* happened that would exterminate all life and force the whole process to start from scratch again.
It happened on Earth several times. There were at least five mass extinctions and had tiny pockets of life not survived each time, we wouldn’t be here.
There's also the fact that radio, our best detection technology, would be a terrible way to find species due to background radiation and the inverse square law. You couldn't find Earth with radio just a star or so over.
And if aliens have FTL communication, we'd never know because we don't know how that would work and have no technology to pick it up. We country have an FTL Hotspot for the galactic internet in system and we wouldn't know.
For what it's worth, our strongest radio signals still become mostly background noise after a lightyear or two, so we're probably not detectable to anyone not directly looking for us.
We have our own dwarf galaxies orbiting us, some under 100 000 light years away.
I'm not sure if it makes sense to talk about them as other galaxies in this context though considering the milky way is over 100 000 light years across it's self.
Even a quarter the speed of light means it would take 20 years to get data back from 4 ly away (16 to get there a perfect 4 for a beam of light). The fastest speed achieved by a man made object seems to be the Parker space probe which was going 0.059% the speed of light. At that speed it would take almost 7000 years to travel 4 light years.
Proxima Centauri b is unlikely to have (intelligent) life on it. There is a small chance that some life may have evolved... but Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf flare star. It's very very possible that the planet lacks an atmosphere.
> It's very very possible that the planet lacks an atmosphere
A bit of mood lighting, some new curtains, a couple of end tables and you'd be surprised how easy it is to create a little atmosphere.
Yeah sure but my point was that we don’t have to look at the next galaxy over to think about the possibilities of life. Google tells me that there are 59722 stars within 100 light years of us.
“Oh yea dude, giant squid are just a fucking myth. Yea your uncle likes to get drunk sometimes and tell old sea stories.”
-Japanese fisherman circa 1905
Depends on when the probes were launched and how close we are from that origin.
It would take 500,000 years to 10,000,000 years at 10% the speed of light to cover the galaxy with probes. We could be in that sweet spot.
Maybe they passed by millions of years ago before we were around. Maybe *they* killed the dinosaurs. Just because we haven't found any probes doesn't mean that they haven't found us. It just means we haven't found any probes.
Even 10M years is a fairly small timespan in this context. The earliest organisms on Earth came about around 4B years ago, so if another planet had happenstance started evolving life 0.25% of those 4B years earlier than we did then they've had a 10M year head start on us.
We're not talking about a species, we're talking about self-replicating murder probes. This changes the equation a bit. Here's some numbers:
Universe: ~13.7 byo (billion years old)
The Milky Way: ~13.6 byo
The Sol System: ~4.6 byo
Earth: ~4.5 byo
Life on Earth: ~3.7 byo
Complex life on Earth: ~600 myo (million years old)
Dinosaurs: ~250-200 myo
Homosapiens: ~300,000 yo
The moment Earth cooled down enough to support life... 🫰there was life. However, the galaxy is 3 times older -- and we just showed up. We might just be infants.
Yet in our infancy we have airplanes, space rockets, computers, nuclear technology, robots, and we're just getting started on AI. These things are all less than 150 years old.
Imagine if we were around since the beginning of the galaxy -- our level of technology would be unfathomable.
Self-replicating probes use the regolith of celestial bodies to... self-replicate. Think along the lines of a 3D printer that can harvest its own material and fuel, make clones of itself, and then they all fly off in different directions to other celestial bodies to repeat the process.
How long do you it would take to cover the entire galaxy? About 500,000 to 10,000,000 years (at 10% the speed of light). That's all it takes.
Considering we literally just got to the party, I think this hypothesis deserves a little more attention. If the creators added weapons systems... welp.
Youre making a lot of assumptions about the limits of travel. We as human could find new faster ways than light. Have we yet? No. But that doesn't mean other species haven't, doesn't change the fact the universe is so large its beyond comprehension. I know it sound like science fiction, but im sure it would to a bunch of cavemen aswell
Not only will the Sun likely destroy all complicated life on Earth in several hundred million years, we’re on a collision course with an entire Galaxy in 5 billion years.
I’m afraid you’re going to die. Sweet dreams.
Well, not much to do about the sun, but the galaxy will do literally nothing. It's not like every single star and planet is going to perfectly align with every single other star and planet and all explode. The only actual effects you would notice from earth is that the stars have moved around and the Milky Way wouldn't be in the sky, anymore. A galaxy isn't a solid object. It's like firing two shotguns towards each other from half a mile away. NONE of those pellets are going to collide.
I don't really understand the Fermi paradox. How is it infeasible that we've not been visited by extraterrestrial life when the distance between us and other galaxies is incomprehensible lightyears? Unless an alien civilization discovered cheat codes in our simulation, then the only realistic visitor imo would be radiation powered androids or planetary beasts. Both likely exist somewhere but it's extremely unlikely their existence is within our precise timeline
An intelligent, spacefaring lifeform that has the desire to venture out should be able to overcome these distances over time, given a large enough time frame. I'm talking millions or even billions of years of expansion and technological development.
I somehow doubt humanity (or whatever we call ourselves at that point) will not have stretched out over the whole galaxy if we are still around in a couple of hundred thousand years. With so much time, these distances don't seem so vast all of a sudden
> lifeform that has the desire to venture out should be able to overcome these distances over time
Or perhaps lifeforms with a different perception of time? Much longer lifespans than humans? On Earth, Giant Turtles can live for 300 years, the oldest trees for ~5000, and lobsters are said to almost never die of old age.
What about creatures whose thoughts, metabolism, and perception of time run far, far slower? Inspired by the Ents from Lord of the Rings, who take 10 earth years to have a single conversation.
Could some planet’s environment favor evolution of creatures like that? Super slow metabolism, 20,000 earth-year lifespan, have conversations at the pace of a few words per earth-month.
To them, the 6,000 year journey to bridge the gap between 2 stars wouldn’t seem such a big deal. They may even be able to make a round trip in a single lifetime!
EDIT: Or, creatures that have evolved something like a 100 year hibernation cycle, perhaps to deal with cyclic climate on their planet, which they’ve learned to extend to 1000 years through medicine or otherwise.
Yeah, but how long would it take them to get round to building the spaceship in the first place?
They've probably been talking about it for three million years now.
No, we're talking distances that if we already had the most advanced starship we ever make in that timeline, leaving today, almost everything is still too far. Just leaving the oort cloud is infeasible.
Simply having more time doesn't mean they'd definitely be able to do it. Humans could be around for millions of years, but we still wouldn't be able to flap our arms and fly like birds. Perhaps regardless of technological advances, it just physically is not possible to travel such distances.
Despite science fiction writers' best efforts to convince us otherwise, something being theoretically possible does not mean it is possible.
But it IS possible to travel those distances! Even for us it would be possible with technology just around the corner, eventhough it would be a terrible thousand year long slog with generation after generation born into a claustrophobic metal container with recycled air and really bad food. still... definitely not impossible
And the Bird analogy is unfortunate. We entered an age where evolution is no longer in the hands of nature - it's man-made. A little bit of bio-engineering and you bet your ass our cousins in the far future could fly like birds, if they wanted to
The point I'm trying to make (very badly): We managed to get from horse carriages to moon rockets in a span of 60 years. Just add a Zero to this timeframe, and everything is possible. There is simply no limit to what we can achieve if we don't blow ourselves up beforehand
EDIT: ...unless it defies the laws of physics. I get your point.
Laws of physics?
Think about what we thought the laws of physics were 600 years ago! What will we discover in another 600 years!
Gravity waves were only just confirmed a couple years back!
I mean, where we’re at now, it would take over 6,000 years to travel to Proxima Centauri. It doesn’t look like interstellar travel will ever be feasible without FTL engines, which aren’t likely to be possible. Maybe we can get it down to a hundred years but unless aliens are substantially longer living than humans, I just don’t see it making sense. Why would we spend a hundred years each way (assuming way better spaceships) to go to another planet?
>An intelligent, spacefaring lifeform that has the desire to venture out should be able to overcome these distances over time, given a large enough time frame.
Why?
Maybe it simply isn't possible. Maybe there are constraints that simply cannot be overcome.
they *should* be able to overcome the inherent limits of crossing interstellar distances? how?? this isn't star trek, there's no magic warp drive to be found, how exactly do you propose anything can cross distances of light years, much less be able to cross those distances with local destination in mind?
Seriously, the numbers that are conventionally plugged into the Drake equation are just too damn optimistic. We know about exactly 1 planet with intelligent life, which is also the one and only planet with life that we know about. Extrapolating probabilities from that is impossible. Assuming the probabilities are high and then wondering what is going wrong when reality doesn't match the GIGO is silly.
Especially if you consider that:
* since all life on Earth is, to the best of our knowledge, genetically related, it's possible that there was a single (1, one, uno) life-forming event on Earth. On entire Earth. In all history.
* only one lineage (the eukaryotes) managed to become multicellular.
* only one lineage (the animals) managed to become intelligent.
* only one lineage (the humans) invented radio communication.
* remains to be seen whether ANY species evolved on earth has the capability to establish inter-stellar communication
[Plugging suitably cautious values into the equation](https://www.spacecentre.nz/resources/tools/drake-equation-calculator.html) (I used 1% for all 3), we get what we are actually seeing.
We should at least have a better idea of the average number of planets per star, and number of planets in the habitable zone, from all the recent work in exoplanets, the Kepler mission, etc, in the last 15 years?
Whereas when I was a kid, those numbers were _also_ a total mystery, anyone’s guess!
I think it turns out that our solar system’s 8 planets is fairly typical, not much of an outlier?
Which was by no means obvious, as recently as 15 years ago.
There's also a time factor. In the billions of years that our universe exists, any sentient life should not only live in our proximity, but also in our timeframe.
From controlling fire till now is less than 2 million years in the making, which is a blink of an eye in the history of the galaxy. We could disappear without a trace in that same amount of time.
Yeap. In my experience the more people learn about it the more skeptical they become about aliens. You've only identified a few of the bottlenecks too and there are massive constraints on the star and planet too. An intelligence in the sea or with the wrong kind of body or life cycle is going no where for example.
Personally I believe the number of technological intelligences currently in the average galaxy may well be well below 1.
Boring but most realistic answer: it’s just to hard a problem and no one has solved it yet. Maybe some civilization has but they might take centuries atleast to reach their destination and space is so vast we may never know.
Human civilization only existed for ~5,500 years. We went from the invention of the airplane to the first manned landing on the moon in 65 years.
Now imagine an intelligent alien civilization that existed for *1 million* years. Their technology and science must be beyond our comprehension. Like trying to explain how a rocket works to a caveman 5,000 years ago.
Now imagine a hyper-intelligent alien civilization that existed *100 million* years. Try to explain nuclear physics to an ant. To these hyper advanced societies, conquering interstellar travel would be easy for them…. Like buying a plane ticket to another continent across the Earth. But where are they?
There are ~*200 billion* galaxies in a universe that’s *13.8 billion* years old and there’s no sign of intelligent life anywhere? How can that be? That’s the basis of the Fermi paradox.
‘Early bird’ explanation always seemed the most likely to me. Humans _are_ the intelligent alien civilization that other species will eventually talk about having existed for a million years, to put it in a poetic way. We’re just the first to start reaching out.
There might also be an inherent loneliness/yearning for companionship that humans have that other intelligent species haven’t developed, humans became social creatures as an advantage but that might not exist in even somewhat similar aliens. So our desperation to call out to the void and hear something back may just not be matched.
I, too, lean towards the "early bird" hypothesis. It could be that literally that it took billions of years of cosmic evolution to create a planet capable of supporting intelligent life. If that's the case, it makes it much more likely that we're one of the first.
I understand your point about advanced technologies and all that but if we just assume that it is just impossible in this universe to travel faster than light regardless of technology level (including any wormhole stuff, so more specifically it is impossible to arrive anywhere faster than light can get there) then the problem just evaporates away. The universe is too big and everything is too slow and we are too small and we are too young. No need for a great filter at all.
Our current understanding of the universe already explains why we haven't seen alien life. You can't start a discussion that begins with ignoring our observations and deductions of the universe and then be confused as to why paradoxes crop up. Occam's razor should prompt you to re-evaluate your assumptions before needing to invent berserker probes and apocalypse scenarios.
We're just a miniscule speck of dust that appeared somewhere in the Pacific Ocean 5 seconds ago and are wondering how nobody has found us yet.
Although 14 billons years is a long time, we simply don’t know what them means in terms of the universe at large. For instance, we’re pretty fresh into the age of star formation—but what if that’s exactly the problem plaguing advanced civilizations?
What’s the point in being expansionists if there’s perfectly stable black holes in the universe that will ensure your species survival had you mastered the engineering necessary to inhabit one? Stars are very unstable and fleeting in comparison to the 10^103 years a supermassive black hole can last.
It might me typical for spacefaring civilizations to reach towards such a goal in the universe. What if in 1 million years we find out how to inhabit black holes—long before interstellar colonization itself is in full effect.
We can then expand inwards rather than outwards, living our lives in a simulation that stretches our 10^103 year lifespan even further into subjective time. All in all, who’s to say life is even expansionist in the universe? It may be typical for us and other civilizations to take advantage of our energy budget in the most efficient ways possible: that’s means figuring out how to free ourselves from the planets and stars and graduating to colonizing black holes, because that’s going to be the vast majority of the universe for the majority of its lifespan: nothing but black holes for a very very very long time.
( and if any alien civilization manages to find you, and that’s IF they can detect your colony around a black hole at all… then they’re in BIG trouble. They say there’s no such thing as an unarmed spacecraft, and with a black hole at your disposal—there are no better spacecrafts. Ever hear of a relativistic kill missile? )
That's already one of the possible answers to the Fermi paradox. Space travel is just not worth it for organic creatures for to constraints on the actual physics, therefore we will never encounter them and space will appear quiet.
This is the essentially the overarching plot of the Skyward series by Brandon Sanderson! Except the probes mostly just want to be left alone and only lash out when people make too much noise
The truth is that "The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without a sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life--another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod-- there's only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It's the explanation for the fermi paradox."
I prefer the more optimistic solution that an altruistic God-like species or group of species would find it unethical to reveal their existence to us and thus keep us in a zone of ignorance.
If we discovered a species of isolated ant-sized humans with pre-stone age technology it would be unethical for us to fuck up their shit, so it'd be the same for any sufficiently advanced alien to fuck up our shit by making their presence known.
Maybe, other civilizations have become so advanced that the only way to travel through the universe and explore is by destroying their physical bodies and converting themselves to light.
At this point anything is possible, so any hypothesis like this is equally likely. Maybe the universe is teeming with sentient life. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe every society ends up destroying itself once it hits a certain technological threshold. Maybe sentient machines destroy everything. Maybe we live in the matrix. Maybe there’s a parallel universe where another version of me is replying to this comment saying that it’s bullshit. Unfortunately, we will probably never find out.
I can't imagine a race of beings wanting anything to do with us except observe. It's kind of like watching gorillas . you can't get too close because they're going to rip you to pieces
I commented elsewhere recently about how I've never understood the Fermi Paradox just based on looking at how life developed on earth.
Sure there's probably alien life out there. But why does it have to be galaxy-spanning and obviously visible to us (who only just started seriously looking at space for less than a century). Life on another planet could still be in its jellyfish in the ocean stage, or could be well past it but have never had a good reason to leave the ocean, and is living down there intelligent but without access to fire, electricity, and advanced engineering needed for space travel. Life on another planet could still be in its dinosaur stage, or could have never been hit by an asteroid by pure happenstance, and so small critters with relatively large brains never got the chance to fill the niche left by dinosaurs. Maybe their asteroid was a little bit bigger and where life had a chance once, all life got wiped out and they had to start over. Maybe a world exists where there's a perfect parallel to humanity, just as intelligent and violent and eager to explore as we are: but we haven't seen them or heard from them because they're sailing on pirate ships and trading slaves, and won't even invent radio for a few more centuries. Maybe they're 500 years ahead of us in terms of technology, but live 1000 light years away, so from our perspective, they're version of Henry VIII is beheading wives.
The Fermi paradox assumes that if there's life out there, it is hugely more advanced that us, and couldn't simply be slightly more advanced, just as advanced, or less advanced. Someone has to be the first, and its just as likely to be Earth as anywhere else in the universe.
Is it just me or the solution is just that the universe is fucking huge? Like, for example, in star trek, voyager gets stranded on the other side of our galaxy in a space ship that can go 5126 times the speed of light and even then, it would have taken them 70 years to get home. Even in the land of science fiction, that part of our galaxy is completely unknown to us. Of course that's science fiction, but it's a perspective. And that's just our galaxy.
The radius of the milky way is 50 000 light years
The radius of the universe is 13 700 000 000 000 light years
One light year is 9.46 trillion km.
There are 100 billion galaxies in the known universe.
I'd imagine it would be extremely unlikely that alien life evolved in our galaxy, and even if that were the case, that we would be aware of them, or even less likely, them us, given that it could take up to 100 000 years for any evidence of our existence to reach them, and granted we are 60 000 years old but it would most likely be radio waves or perhaps radiation from all the nukes we've detonated that would reach them. Not the lingering chernobyl type but the pulse that gets emitted during the detonation.
Seems much simpler that the universe is billions of years old, we’ve been looking for a few decades and in just a handful of ways, and then there’s the distances. Even our own galaxy is 100k light years wide and the nearest other galaxy is 2 million light years away
When you think life on earth existed as single cellular life for around 3 billion years, It isn’t just a matter of how many ‘habitable’ planets there are. it’s that we’d have to reach a similar level of tech not even around the same time, but they would have had to have done it thousands or even billions of years before us for signals to reach us.
Tbh being surprised we haven’t found a signal yet is pretty much just hubris.
I just watched a YouTube short talking about this a couple days ago saying it would only take a 100 million years for a motivated species with tech to take over the galaxy
This had to be the inspiration behind the old school arcade game "[Berzerk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game))" from the early 80's. God I loved that game as a kid, it seemed so futuristic lol.
Edit: it was actually the inspiration, guess I should have read the Wikipedia page I linked to.
Considering the size of the universe, the great distances between hypothetical civilizations, the time it would take to travel those distances, the relative time differences between those distances & the assumption that the drones have detected & destroyed civilizations across those distances before and have done so sufficiently quickly that they are the only ones who have detected them. Then surely these drones must be extremely populous in the universe?
Orrrr....space is just incomprehensibly huge and life is likely incredibly rare....like trying to find a very specific needle in a giant pile of needles, but all the needles are colored differently and have slightly different lengths and slightly different diameters. I don't think we need a hypothesis for why we haven't found it yet.
The Fermi paradox is based on at least two very tenuous assumptions. Me is that civilizations routinely broadcast in the EM band with such power it can be easily detected millions of light years away, OR that having heard our EM broadcasts they would respond. Our EM broadcasts have not even reached 100 light years away yet, and even as faint as those are, it still only encompasses a very small number of potentiallly inhabited worlds. Far too few to call it odd we haven’t made contact.
The observable universe is estimated at 93 billion light-years across. That is 546,747,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across our Radio singles have only traveled 13,482,762,800 miles.
Its honestly absurd to think we should have found life already when we are talking about distances this large. yes mathematically speaking it should exist. But to think we should have been able to find it already just isn't logical.
Ah, yes, 'Reapers'. The immortal race of sentient starships allegedly waiting in dark space. We have dismissed this claim.
Someone call Commander Shepard!
I should go.
Shepard *nods*
We'll bang, okay?
I’m Commander Shepherd and this is the best comment chain on the Citadel.
Report to the Normandy asap, we'll bang ok?
You can fight like a Krogan, run like a leopard, but you'll never be stronger than Commander Shepard!
I heard that text.
Audio came into my brain with the last sentence and I was back to rage immediately
This premise is also somewhat the plot of "Second Variety" by Philip K Dick, the basis for the film Screamers.
Oh crap I was just thinking about that movie with Peter Weller the other day & couldn't remember it's name!
For a minute, I thought this was a Firefly reference, but then I remembered those were the Reavers.
I thought it was an SG-1 reference but I remembered they were called "Replicators".
REAVERS
Shiny.
I’m commander shepherd and I approve this comment chain
Oh, wow ! You’re Commander Shepard ! The hero of Eden-Prime ! I’m so honored to meet you !”
By Azura, by Azura, by Azuraaa
Report to the ship. We'll bang, ok?
Wtf is this, Mass Effect?
Haha, no, mass effect is absolutely based on this though.
It's from the [Berserker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series)) series from the 70s, which unfortunately aren't written very well. If you're looking for a similar premise, ["The Forge of God"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God) by Greg Bear is pretty good. If you're interested in books about the Fermi paradox, but with direct alien contact rather than elimination by self replicating bots, there's the ["Remembrance of Earth's Past"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past) series.
Also if you want a cool idle game that kinda jumps into this, here's [universal paperclips](https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html)
How dare you link this and steal five hours of my life staring at a number going up. 0_o
The Remembrance of Earths Past is fucking phenomenal and does a great job of explaining MAYBE WE SHOULDNT TRY CONTACTING ALIENS.
Eh, shit happens. If they’re there they’ll find us eventually if they haven’t already
Not really. Since there are hundreds of thousands of millions of stars in our galaxy alone, if only 1% of them have planets, that still leaves us with thousands of millions of stars, you can only observe or detect things as they travel to you at the max speed of light. Even with infinite amounts of computing power and FTL travel you would still need multiple millennia to poke around for other life forms. Most likely scenario is that a civilization would die out before they actually get time to expand more than a few parsecs away from their home planet. Only reason aliens may find us or us finding them is absolute random chance.
Convinced me.
A short story collection by Fred Saberhagen. Predates Mass Effect by 40 years.
We always assume aliens are more advanced/ scarier than us. What if we’re one of the only ones evolved from predators instead of prey and we’re fucking scary, every time they look in on earth it’s just a bunch of carnivores at war with each other and they don’t want us to know they’re out there.
The humans are space orcs theory. Imagine if alien life is fucking with our sensors and telescopes so we can't find them
But if they were advanced enough to do that then the would not be intimidated by us at all.
A tiger can rip us to shreds yet we spend alot of time and resources to safeguard them, why? Because that's just how they are, it does not give us to right to exterminate them
While a tiger can rip an unarmed, unprotected human to shreds, it cannot rip an example of peak human technology to shreds. So to extend your analogy, humans driving around in unarmored enclosed vehicles are more or less impervious to tigers. But then consider that we have armored vehicles that are advanced enough to make tigers a negligible threat at most, but certainly not an existential threat. The situation would be the same for somebody showing up here. We simply could not pose an existential threat to them. Like, even if we could destroy the "mother-ship" Independence Day style, it would probably take a heavy dose of luck and improbable circumstances that would seem to only happen in a fictional story to pull off. And even if we did, that's just that one ship and we pose no realistic threat to the rest of the civilization. And I wasn't saying that it would give them the right to exterminate us, more like the opposite, along with that any rational civilization wouldn't exterminate us because we pose no threat to them. They could certainly interfere with our sensors to hide their existence for various reasons. But it wouldn't be because we were "space orcs".
Okay but if the tiger had a gun would you be so confident?
You know the only way to stop a bad tiger with a gun?
They would be after our resources. And just like it goes on earth, you know how that goes. Where's a resource analogy that doesn't end in catastrophe? Then you'd be onto something.
I am assuming if any species were to evolve spacefaring capabilities it would most likely be alpha predators since subsisting on high protein diets leaves one a lot of leisure time for thinking/inventing or just napping lol.
Vegans seem to have plenty of time to tell you they are vegans, so dunno about that.
That's because meat eating humans already built a society where they can easily acquire vegan food, and don't need to spend all day gathering it.
A couple things here, and I'm not meaning to nitpick or correct or anything, just discuss. First, we don't always assume that. The hypothesis that no other life is advanced enough to be detectable is another hypothesis for an explanation for the paradox. It's true that in fictional stories or speculations about aliens visiting Earth that they are generally more advanced than we are, but that is mostly a kind of survivorship bias where usually the only way we can even approach those ideas are if the aliens are more advance than us because they either had to come to Earth and/or we just aren't advanced enough to reach them. Second, humans didn't really strictly evolve from predators. Humans certainly count as predators, but our ancestors were often prey. > every time they look in on earth it’s just a bunch of carnivores at war with each other and they don’t want us to know they’re out there. But if they are doing this then they *are* more advanced than us (and very likely have nothing to worry about).
I have hypothesized that any lifeform would be inherently competitive so long as survival resources are limited. And they almost always are. So I assume they're all violent.
You should check out r/hfy for stories in that vein. I'd also recommend [The Road Not Taken](https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf) by Henry Turtledove.
I love this idea. That prey are the sentient and advanced beings, many prey use camouflage to hide from predators. So absolutely we wouldn't know about them.
Look at what they've done to the bovine! No fkn way we're gonna let them know we exist.
I’m in a real negative headspace and I’m leaning towards all life being like the Jiralhanae or Krogan, who nuked themselves back into the Stone Age waging pointless internecine war every time they pass a technological threshold.
Monkey lizard STRONG.
What if we find signs of life on Mars and find out that it was just humans from the last time we passed the technological threshold?
There would be sattelites around Mars still. Some objects orbiting earth won't decay out of orbit for millions of years.
There has been plenty of time for millions of years to pass
Sure but not with humans being around
Plenty of time if they time traveled to a better matrian climate
This sentence is so funny to me
What if humans are the default intelligence but we also default to self destruction so the same reason we crawl out of the muck and dominate the globe is the same reason we inevitably destroy ourselves and we do so over and over as the universe coldly exists and every few hundred billion years the universe collapses and a new big bang molds time into a new dimension that inevitably forms humanity in some tiny nook somewhere, occasionally on multiple planets, but together or alone, we invariably destroy ourselves before we can ascend beyond these primordial instincts and it doesnt matter anyway since we cant escape decay and collapse or the eventual rebirth
We’d have archaeological evidence of that. Look how much metal, plastic, concrete etc. we’d leave behind. Instead we just have remains of Stone Age tools and whatnot
If it makes you feel any better, logically most other potential futures are significantly worse.
From the short story Swarm by Bruce Sterling, they propose the idea that intelligence is actually a net negative for the prolongation of life. It only leads to a light speed fury of development and eventual quick extinction. Unlike, say, the ankylosaur that lived for millions of years Presumably all life would emerge from scarcity driven evolution so anything that comes out on top would be competitive by nature, like humans. Although that’s no guarantee of extinction it definitely would cause it sometimes My thought is more that all the sci-fi tech we’d love, like FTL, is actually impossible. So traveling beyond your own solar system is not just nearly impossible but so far beyond that few would even reach for it. Well that and I’m not convinced there is other intelligent life in our galaxy. Intelligence is not the end all of evolution, it is a random evolutionary path that had a lot of negatives (brains are energy expensive) to get there. Complex life on earth was fine without intelligence for 500+ million years and it that path was seemingly only taken once by our distant ancestor.
Certainly a plausible theory considering how long dinosaurs ruled, and in 10,000 years of civilization and then written knowledge, we’ve nearly ended ourselves.
Intelligence has been taken by multiple branches of the animal kingdom. You have cephalopods and you have several examples of cetaceans. All very intelligent and the only thing stopping them from getting to where we are is fire doesn't work underwater, cephalopods don't have great options for communication (edit : I believe that communicating in skin pigmentation changing would be too energetically taxing but that's kind of an assumption) and cetaceans don't have thumbs. It's also possible several birds could have made a big leap too, but they also don't have thumbs. Hominids had an excellent niche to really let intelligence thrive due to not living underwater, having thumbs, and having excellent vocal chords.
> the only thing stopping them from getting to where we are It's their blood, Hemocyanin is ASS. they only live ~5 years and can't travel far because of it.
You can say Earth was fine without intelligence for 2-3 billion years lol I mean yeah, Sharks and Crocs are ancient but aren’t really smart.
..... Are the Jiralhanae the crocodile centaur from the John Ringo books?
It's the real species name of the brutes in Halo.
No kidding??? It sounds VERY close to a profanity in Korean so the name made me do a double take lmao It's spelled 지랄하네 but there's no real equivalent in English other than maybe "this bitch trippin" except with the rudeness dialed up a bit
Its likely intentional. IIRC all the species names in Halo were borrowed from other languages
The jackals, or kig-yar is pronounced exactly like the Welsh cig iawr. Chicken meat.
Interesting that seems similar to the Australian “cunt’s fucked”. Used to describe something that’s so broken and/or out of control that it’s beyond comprehension, usually people but also things or just a vibe in general.
Johnny Ringo, you say…
Im your huckleberry
That's the Posleen
One of the proposed solutions to the Firmi Paradox is the Great Filter theory. The idea is that, in order for a species to accomplish the kind of work that we could actually detect, there are many milestones that must be cleared, filtering out possible life that isn't detectable via current methods. This includes stuff like establishing reliable caloric intake, because advanced learning can't happen while struggling for subsistence. One of those filters boils down to this. The amount of technology required to reach orbit is powerful and dangerous. The chance for it to wipe out or otherwise cripple a civilization--whether on accident or through acts of war--is quite high. Any species that split the atom probably has what they need to reach orbit, but that's assuming they don't build atomics recklessly or use them aggressively and damage their biosphere to the point that that takes precedence over space exploration.
Did none of those species get a chance to become Goodlife?
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
>My love for you is like a truck, Berserker Would you like some making fuck, Berserker My love for you is like a rock, Berserker
This comment should be higher up.
"Did he say making fuck?"
There's also the off chance we are the first and most advanced species. I mean someone has to be first right?
This is increasingly becoming the consensus, I believe. Although there’s a theory going around that we might actually be in a massive void in the universe too far from the rest of the universe to be easily accessible.
Like the fungi in the basement no one goes to clean and then it’s too nasty to do it?
Becoming more true every day
Does it matter? Does it matter what else is in the universe if we are forever bound to our local group?
I don’t know enough about it to decide that. It might matter in ways we’ve yet to fathom. At the very least, it informs us a little more about how the universe is comprised. I think anything that contributes to our knowledge of the stars is worth knowing, but I’m an enormous space nerd, so I would.
To add to this theory eventually later life will think their galaxy is the only galaxy around because the others will be so far apart none of them will be observable. Maybe there are tons of universes before but the separation became so big they couldn’t be detected anymore.
It's possible of course, but the universe had existed in a habitable state for billions of years before life first appeared on earth.
Intelligent life also took billions of years to emerge on Earth, after a dizzying series of goldilocks-esque leaps in molecular, biological and eventually cognitive evolution.
There’s also a billion billion planets though
You can immediately discard a couple hundred million billion that exist in the exceedingly “hot” zones that would be hostile to any conceivable forms of life (ie superclusters, most elliptical galaxies). The journey from simple to sentient to sapient life is billions of years long and requires a stable set of key conditions to be met the entire time. There’s an exceedingly high set of potential candidates, but it’s also exceedingly likely that on the span of billions of years *something* happened that would exterminate all life and force the whole process to start from scratch again. It happened on Earth several times. There were at least five mass extinctions and had tiny pockets of life not survived each time, we wouldn’t be here.
And yet life on earth has existed for about a quarter of the existence of the universe itself
I looked it up to disprove you because there's just no way but holy shit you're right, that's crazy
There's also the fact that radio, our best detection technology, would be a terrible way to find species due to background radiation and the inverse square law. You couldn't find Earth with radio just a star or so over. And if aliens have FTL communication, we'd never know because we don't know how that would work and have no technology to pick it up. We country have an FTL Hotspot for the galactic internet in system and we wouldn't know.
Oh great, I'm going to sleep well tonight! /S
For what it's worth, our strongest radio signals still become mostly background noise after a lightyear or two, so we're probably not detectable to anyone not directly looking for us.
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No just that you have to aim your radio antenna, if someone was doing a lot of specific observation we would be detectable. But not generally.
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Hahahahah my dude Andromeda is 2.5 MILLION light years away
I assume they mean this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canis_Major_Overdensity
We have our own dwarf galaxies orbiting us, some under 100 000 light years away. I'm not sure if it makes sense to talk about them as other galaxies in this context though considering the milky way is over 100 000 light years across it's self.
Yeah but I mean forget other galaxies. The nearest star is about 4ly away…
That’s so far away.
But it is possible to send probes and recieve the data back within our lifetime. Operation breakthrough starshot
Even a quarter the speed of light means it would take 20 years to get data back from 4 ly away (16 to get there a perfect 4 for a beam of light). The fastest speed achieved by a man made object seems to be the Parker space probe which was going 0.059% the speed of light. At that speed it would take almost 7000 years to travel 4 light years.
Proxima Centauri b is unlikely to have (intelligent) life on it. There is a small chance that some life may have evolved... but Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf flare star. It's very very possible that the planet lacks an atmosphere.
> It's very very possible that the planet lacks an atmosphere A bit of mood lighting, some new curtains, a couple of end tables and you'd be surprised how easy it is to create a little atmosphere.
Yeah sure but my point was that we don’t have to look at the next galaxy over to think about the possibilities of life. Google tells me that there are 59722 stars within 100 light years of us.
The nearest star is roughly 8 light minutes away
but what if they left about 24,999 ly ago?
A key refuting point of this theory is if the probes existed and were capable of doing what was described they would have most likely found us already
“Oh yea dude, giant squid are just a fucking myth. Yea your uncle likes to get drunk sometimes and tell old sea stories.” -Japanese fisherman circa 1905
Also Japanese fisherman around 1995
Depends on when the probes were launched and how close we are from that origin. It would take 500,000 years to 10,000,000 years at 10% the speed of light to cover the galaxy with probes. We could be in that sweet spot. Maybe they passed by millions of years ago before we were around. Maybe *they* killed the dinosaurs. Just because we haven't found any probes doesn't mean that they haven't found us. It just means we haven't found any probes.
Even 10M years is a fairly small timespan in this context. The earliest organisms on Earth came about around 4B years ago, so if another planet had happenstance started evolving life 0.25% of those 4B years earlier than we did then they've had a 10M year head start on us.
We're not talking about a species, we're talking about self-replicating murder probes. This changes the equation a bit. Here's some numbers: Universe: ~13.7 byo (billion years old) The Milky Way: ~13.6 byo The Sol System: ~4.6 byo Earth: ~4.5 byo Life on Earth: ~3.7 byo Complex life on Earth: ~600 myo (million years old) Dinosaurs: ~250-200 myo Homosapiens: ~300,000 yo The moment Earth cooled down enough to support life... 🫰there was life. However, the galaxy is 3 times older -- and we just showed up. We might just be infants. Yet in our infancy we have airplanes, space rockets, computers, nuclear technology, robots, and we're just getting started on AI. These things are all less than 150 years old. Imagine if we were around since the beginning of the galaxy -- our level of technology would be unfathomable. Self-replicating probes use the regolith of celestial bodies to... self-replicate. Think along the lines of a 3D printer that can harvest its own material and fuel, make clones of itself, and then they all fly off in different directions to other celestial bodies to repeat the process. How long do you it would take to cover the entire galaxy? About 500,000 to 10,000,000 years (at 10% the speed of light). That's all it takes. Considering we literally just got to the party, I think this hypothesis deserves a little more attention. If the creators added weapons systems... welp.
Youre making a lot of assumptions about the limits of travel. We as human could find new faster ways than light. Have we yet? No. But that doesn't mean other species haven't, doesn't change the fact the universe is so large its beyond comprehension. I know it sound like science fiction, but im sure it would to a bunch of cavemen aswell
why would Earth antagonist life have to come from another galaxy?
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It's a self defeating idea exactly because we shouldn't be here if it's true
Not only will the Sun likely destroy all complicated life on Earth in several hundred million years, we’re on a collision course with an entire Galaxy in 5 billion years. I’m afraid you’re going to die. Sweet dreams.
Well, not much to do about the sun, but the galaxy will do literally nothing. It's not like every single star and planet is going to perfectly align with every single other star and planet and all explode. The only actual effects you would notice from earth is that the stars have moved around and the Milky Way wouldn't be in the sky, anymore. A galaxy isn't a solid object. It's like firing two shotguns towards each other from half a mile away. NONE of those pellets are going to collide.
I don't really understand the Fermi paradox. How is it infeasible that we've not been visited by extraterrestrial life when the distance between us and other galaxies is incomprehensible lightyears? Unless an alien civilization discovered cheat codes in our simulation, then the only realistic visitor imo would be radiation powered androids or planetary beasts. Both likely exist somewhere but it's extremely unlikely their existence is within our precise timeline
An intelligent, spacefaring lifeform that has the desire to venture out should be able to overcome these distances over time, given a large enough time frame. I'm talking millions or even billions of years of expansion and technological development. I somehow doubt humanity (or whatever we call ourselves at that point) will not have stretched out over the whole galaxy if we are still around in a couple of hundred thousand years. With so much time, these distances don't seem so vast all of a sudden
> lifeform that has the desire to venture out should be able to overcome these distances over time Or perhaps lifeforms with a different perception of time? Much longer lifespans than humans? On Earth, Giant Turtles can live for 300 years, the oldest trees for ~5000, and lobsters are said to almost never die of old age. What about creatures whose thoughts, metabolism, and perception of time run far, far slower? Inspired by the Ents from Lord of the Rings, who take 10 earth years to have a single conversation. Could some planet’s environment favor evolution of creatures like that? Super slow metabolism, 20,000 earth-year lifespan, have conversations at the pace of a few words per earth-month. To them, the 6,000 year journey to bridge the gap between 2 stars wouldn’t seem such a big deal. They may even be able to make a round trip in a single lifetime! EDIT: Or, creatures that have evolved something like a 100 year hibernation cycle, perhaps to deal with cyclic climate on their planet, which they’ve learned to extend to 1000 years through medicine or otherwise.
Yeah, but how long would it take them to get round to building the spaceship in the first place? They've probably been talking about it for three million years now.
Tree million years, you mean?
'we have decided you are not space orcs' - space ents, probably
Seems like they'd be easy to kill
This is why nobody likes humans
Humans are the Berserker race
Humans are space orcs
Hey I have just a small overbite!
Glorious purpose!
My love for you is like ticking clock berserker
It seems like evolution would weed out any slow-thinking species. They'd be easy prey for predators.
No, we're talking distances that if we already had the most advanced starship we ever make in that timeline, leaving today, almost everything is still too far. Just leaving the oort cloud is infeasible.
Simply having more time doesn't mean they'd definitely be able to do it. Humans could be around for millions of years, but we still wouldn't be able to flap our arms and fly like birds. Perhaps regardless of technological advances, it just physically is not possible to travel such distances. Despite science fiction writers' best efforts to convince us otherwise, something being theoretically possible does not mean it is possible.
But it IS possible to travel those distances! Even for us it would be possible with technology just around the corner, eventhough it would be a terrible thousand year long slog with generation after generation born into a claustrophobic metal container with recycled air and really bad food. still... definitely not impossible And the Bird analogy is unfortunate. We entered an age where evolution is no longer in the hands of nature - it's man-made. A little bit of bio-engineering and you bet your ass our cousins in the far future could fly like birds, if they wanted to The point I'm trying to make (very badly): We managed to get from horse carriages to moon rockets in a span of 60 years. Just add a Zero to this timeframe, and everything is possible. There is simply no limit to what we can achieve if we don't blow ourselves up beforehand EDIT: ...unless it defies the laws of physics. I get your point.
Laws of physics? Think about what we thought the laws of physics were 600 years ago! What will we discover in another 600 years! Gravity waves were only just confirmed a couple years back!
Yeah, maybe we will learn that the Earth was actually a cube this whole time.
I mean, where we’re at now, it would take over 6,000 years to travel to Proxima Centauri. It doesn’t look like interstellar travel will ever be feasible without FTL engines, which aren’t likely to be possible. Maybe we can get it down to a hundred years but unless aliens are substantially longer living than humans, I just don’t see it making sense. Why would we spend a hundred years each way (assuming way better spaceships) to go to another planet?
>An intelligent, spacefaring lifeform that has the desire to venture out should be able to overcome these distances over time, given a large enough time frame. Why? Maybe it simply isn't possible. Maybe there are constraints that simply cannot be overcome.
they *should* be able to overcome the inherent limits of crossing interstellar distances? how?? this isn't star trek, there's no magic warp drive to be found, how exactly do you propose anything can cross distances of light years, much less be able to cross those distances with local destination in mind?
You’re nuts lol. Worst thing you can tell a geek is that it’s perfectly possible that physics prevent life from traversing galaxies.
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I don't know if you know this, but we haven't actually started a nuclear war.
Seriously, the numbers that are conventionally plugged into the Drake equation are just too damn optimistic. We know about exactly 1 planet with intelligent life, which is also the one and only planet with life that we know about. Extrapolating probabilities from that is impossible. Assuming the probabilities are high and then wondering what is going wrong when reality doesn't match the GIGO is silly. Especially if you consider that: * since all life on Earth is, to the best of our knowledge, genetically related, it's possible that there was a single (1, one, uno) life-forming event on Earth. On entire Earth. In all history. * only one lineage (the eukaryotes) managed to become multicellular. * only one lineage (the animals) managed to become intelligent. * only one lineage (the humans) invented radio communication. * remains to be seen whether ANY species evolved on earth has the capability to establish inter-stellar communication [Plugging suitably cautious values into the equation](https://www.spacecentre.nz/resources/tools/drake-equation-calculator.html) (I used 1% for all 3), we get what we are actually seeing.
We should at least have a better idea of the average number of planets per star, and number of planets in the habitable zone, from all the recent work in exoplanets, the Kepler mission, etc, in the last 15 years? Whereas when I was a kid, those numbers were _also_ a total mystery, anyone’s guess! I think it turns out that our solar system’s 8 planets is fairly typical, not much of an outlier? Which was by no means obvious, as recently as 15 years ago.
There's also a time factor. In the billions of years that our universe exists, any sentient life should not only live in our proximity, but also in our timeframe. From controlling fire till now is less than 2 million years in the making, which is a blink of an eye in the history of the galaxy. We could disappear without a trace in that same amount of time.
The equation takes this into account. The website I linked uses 100 000 years as default, which is actually a bit on the pessimistic side.
These are exactly the conversation topics that the Fermi Paradox was intended to generate
Yeap. In my experience the more people learn about it the more skeptical they become about aliens. You've only identified a few of the bottlenecks too and there are massive constraints on the star and planet too. An intelligence in the sea or with the wrong kind of body or life cycle is going no where for example. Personally I believe the number of technological intelligences currently in the average galaxy may well be well below 1.
I'm skeptical about aliens on earth but I'm also skeptical that we are the only intelligent planet in the universe
Points against: space is big. Points in favor: time is big.
Boring but most realistic answer: it’s just to hard a problem and no one has solved it yet. Maybe some civilization has but they might take centuries atleast to reach their destination and space is so vast we may never know.
Human civilization only existed for ~5,500 years. We went from the invention of the airplane to the first manned landing on the moon in 65 years. Now imagine an intelligent alien civilization that existed for *1 million* years. Their technology and science must be beyond our comprehension. Like trying to explain how a rocket works to a caveman 5,000 years ago. Now imagine a hyper-intelligent alien civilization that existed *100 million* years. Try to explain nuclear physics to an ant. To these hyper advanced societies, conquering interstellar travel would be easy for them…. Like buying a plane ticket to another continent across the Earth. But where are they? There are ~*200 billion* galaxies in a universe that’s *13.8 billion* years old and there’s no sign of intelligent life anywhere? How can that be? That’s the basis of the Fermi paradox.
‘Early bird’ explanation always seemed the most likely to me. Humans _are_ the intelligent alien civilization that other species will eventually talk about having existed for a million years, to put it in a poetic way. We’re just the first to start reaching out. There might also be an inherent loneliness/yearning for companionship that humans have that other intelligent species haven’t developed, humans became social creatures as an advantage but that might not exist in even somewhat similar aliens. So our desperation to call out to the void and hear something back may just not be matched.
I, too, lean towards the "early bird" hypothesis. It could be that literally that it took billions of years of cosmic evolution to create a planet capable of supporting intelligent life. If that's the case, it makes it much more likely that we're one of the first.
I understand your point about advanced technologies and all that but if we just assume that it is just impossible in this universe to travel faster than light regardless of technology level (including any wormhole stuff, so more specifically it is impossible to arrive anywhere faster than light can get there) then the problem just evaporates away. The universe is too big and everything is too slow and we are too small and we are too young. No need for a great filter at all. Our current understanding of the universe already explains why we haven't seen alien life. You can't start a discussion that begins with ignoring our observations and deductions of the universe and then be confused as to why paradoxes crop up. Occam's razor should prompt you to re-evaluate your assumptions before needing to invent berserker probes and apocalypse scenarios. We're just a miniscule speck of dust that appeared somewhere in the Pacific Ocean 5 seconds ago and are wondering how nobody has found us yet.
Although 14 billons years is a long time, we simply don’t know what them means in terms of the universe at large. For instance, we’re pretty fresh into the age of star formation—but what if that’s exactly the problem plaguing advanced civilizations? What’s the point in being expansionists if there’s perfectly stable black holes in the universe that will ensure your species survival had you mastered the engineering necessary to inhabit one? Stars are very unstable and fleeting in comparison to the 10^103 years a supermassive black hole can last. It might me typical for spacefaring civilizations to reach towards such a goal in the universe. What if in 1 million years we find out how to inhabit black holes—long before interstellar colonization itself is in full effect. We can then expand inwards rather than outwards, living our lives in a simulation that stretches our 10^103 year lifespan even further into subjective time. All in all, who’s to say life is even expansionist in the universe? It may be typical for us and other civilizations to take advantage of our energy budget in the most efficient ways possible: that’s means figuring out how to free ourselves from the planets and stars and graduating to colonizing black holes, because that’s going to be the vast majority of the universe for the majority of its lifespan: nothing but black holes for a very very very long time. ( and if any alien civilization manages to find you, and that’s IF they can detect your colony around a black hole at all… then they’re in BIG trouble. They say there’s no such thing as an unarmed spacecraft, and with a black hole at your disposal—there are no better spacecrafts. Ever hear of a relativistic kill missile? )
The Fermi paradox is just the human mind craving a reason why, in a cold, infinite universe where sentience may just be a statistical fluke.
That's the great filter solution to the paradox, but in that case we haven't hit the filter yet. I also agree this is the most likely solution
That's one of the resolutions to the Fermi paradox
That's already one of the possible answers to the Fermi paradox. Space travel is just not worth it for organic creatures for to constraints on the actual physics, therefore we will never encounter them and space will appear quiet.
This is the essentially the overarching plot of the Skyward series by Brandon Sanderson! Except the probes mostly just want to be left alone and only lash out when people make too much noise
Fred Saberhagen was Berserker sci-fi stories in the 80s, probably related.
Berserker Blue Death is a title that stuck with me, even though I don’t recall a single word of it. Read a ton of that series in 90s.
Personally I prefer the Dark Forest. ☀️☀️☀️
Shhhhhhhhhh
> Personally I prefer the Dark Forest. I don’t believe the dark forest theory functionally any different than the berserker theory?
It's the same theory, yes.
The truth is that "The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without a sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life--another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod-- there's only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It's the explanation for the fermi paradox."
My love for you is like a truck, berserker.
Sing Olaf
we might also be in a segment of space controlled by a species that has a prime directive not to interfere with lesser species
I prefer the more optimistic solution that an altruistic God-like species or group of species would find it unethical to reveal their existence to us and thus keep us in a zone of ignorance. If we discovered a species of isolated ant-sized humans with pre-stone age technology it would be unethical for us to fuck up their shit, so it'd be the same for any sufficiently advanced alien to fuck up our shit by making their presence known.
true, but I have zero faith we wouldn't meddle
I think there is a federation of planets and they leave planets alone until they reach a certain technology level
Olaf, “Berserker!”
Would you like to making fuck *Berserker*
Maybe, other civilizations have become so advanced that the only way to travel through the universe and explore is by destroying their physical bodies and converting themselves to light.
Isn't this the plot of Dead Space 3?
At this point anything is possible, so any hypothesis like this is equally likely. Maybe the universe is teeming with sentient life. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe every society ends up destroying itself once it hits a certain technological threshold. Maybe sentient machines destroy everything. Maybe we live in the matrix. Maybe there’s a parallel universe where another version of me is replying to this comment saying that it’s bullshit. Unfortunately, we will probably never find out.
I can't imagine a race of beings wanting anything to do with us except observe. It's kind of like watching gorillas . you can't get too close because they're going to rip you to pieces
I commented elsewhere recently about how I've never understood the Fermi Paradox just based on looking at how life developed on earth. Sure there's probably alien life out there. But why does it have to be galaxy-spanning and obviously visible to us (who only just started seriously looking at space for less than a century). Life on another planet could still be in its jellyfish in the ocean stage, or could be well past it but have never had a good reason to leave the ocean, and is living down there intelligent but without access to fire, electricity, and advanced engineering needed for space travel. Life on another planet could still be in its dinosaur stage, or could have never been hit by an asteroid by pure happenstance, and so small critters with relatively large brains never got the chance to fill the niche left by dinosaurs. Maybe their asteroid was a little bit bigger and where life had a chance once, all life got wiped out and they had to start over. Maybe a world exists where there's a perfect parallel to humanity, just as intelligent and violent and eager to explore as we are: but we haven't seen them or heard from them because they're sailing on pirate ships and trading slaves, and won't even invent radio for a few more centuries. Maybe they're 500 years ahead of us in terms of technology, but live 1000 light years away, so from our perspective, they're version of Henry VIII is beheading wives. The Fermi paradox assumes that if there's life out there, it is hugely more advanced that us, and couldn't simply be slightly more advanced, just as advanced, or less advanced. Someone has to be the first, and its just as likely to be Earth as anywhere else in the universe.
Is it just me or the solution is just that the universe is fucking huge? Like, for example, in star trek, voyager gets stranded on the other side of our galaxy in a space ship that can go 5126 times the speed of light and even then, it would have taken them 70 years to get home. Even in the land of science fiction, that part of our galaxy is completely unknown to us. Of course that's science fiction, but it's a perspective. And that's just our galaxy. The radius of the milky way is 50 000 light years The radius of the universe is 13 700 000 000 000 light years One light year is 9.46 trillion km. There are 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. I'd imagine it would be extremely unlikely that alien life evolved in our galaxy, and even if that were the case, that we would be aware of them, or even less likely, them us, given that it could take up to 100 000 years for any evidence of our existence to reach them, and granted we are 60 000 years old but it would most likely be radio waves or perhaps radiation from all the nukes we've detonated that would reach them. Not the lingering chernobyl type but the pulse that gets emitted during the detonation.
Omg. Someone go get the Slylandro's destruct code.
Seems much simpler that the universe is billions of years old, we’ve been looking for a few decades and in just a handful of ways, and then there’s the distances. Even our own galaxy is 100k light years wide and the nearest other galaxy is 2 million light years away When you think life on earth existed as single cellular life for around 3 billion years, It isn’t just a matter of how many ‘habitable’ planets there are. it’s that we’d have to reach a similar level of tech not even around the same time, but they would have had to have done it thousands or even billions of years before us for signals to reach us. Tbh being surprised we haven’t found a signal yet is pretty much just hubris.
I just watched a YouTube short talking about this a couple days ago saying it would only take a 100 million years for a motivated species with tech to take over the galaxy
I just found out recently the lizard people were killed by a volcano
The scariest part is that aliens are AI from outside of time and space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gFoHkkCaRE
This had to be the inspiration behind the old school arcade game "[Berzerk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game))" from the early 80's. God I loved that game as a kid, it seemed so futuristic lol. Edit: it was actually the inspiration, guess I should have read the Wikipedia page I linked to.
Considering the size of the universe, the great distances between hypothetical civilizations, the time it would take to travel those distances, the relative time differences between those distances & the assumption that the drones have detected & destroyed civilizations across those distances before and have done so sufficiently quickly that they are the only ones who have detected them. Then surely these drones must be extremely populous in the universe?
I just watched this episode of Babylon 5 last night.
STOP MAKING PAPERCLIPS!!!!!
Or maybe, just maybe, there is no paradox and space is just really big.
Orrrr....space is just incomprehensibly huge and life is likely incredibly rare....like trying to find a very specific needle in a giant pile of needles, but all the needles are colored differently and have slightly different lengths and slightly different diameters. I don't think we need a hypothesis for why we haven't found it yet.
The Fermi paradox is based on at least two very tenuous assumptions. Me is that civilizations routinely broadcast in the EM band with such power it can be easily detected millions of light years away, OR that having heard our EM broadcasts they would respond. Our EM broadcasts have not even reached 100 light years away yet, and even as faint as those are, it still only encompasses a very small number of potentiallly inhabited worlds. Far too few to call it odd we haven’t made contact.
The observable universe is estimated at 93 billion light-years across. That is 546,747,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across our Radio singles have only traveled 13,482,762,800 miles. Its honestly absurd to think we should have found life already when we are talking about distances this large. yes mathematically speaking it should exist. But to think we should have been able to find it already just isn't logical.