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The Fermi Paradox. What is it you may ask? Well if you haven’t understood yet from the title description, here is a nice explanation from Wikipedia.



So basically, if there are other ET Civilizations out there, why haven’t they contacted us? Our Galaxy is 10 billion years old. Sol and Earth are half that age. Lets assume that a Civilization doesn’t go faster than light or uses wormholes. Lets say their engines allow them to go at 20% of the speed of light. Assuming they colonize almost constantly they should colonize the Galaxy within 100 million years. That’s 1/50 of Earth’s age.

Many thoughts and ideas have been put forth into this Paradox. My personal theory is that Intellegance is common, but only observes other civilizations and allows the civilizations to come to them.

What do you think?

Hmm.. that is interesting.. It's possible that extraterrestrial life is rarer than we thought. It might be that the planets in question have enough to support life but don't have enough resources to support many spaceships or anything else. It might be that Earth is a greater and rarer planet than we expect. Maybe it takes too long to get between certain galaxies at 20% of the speed of light and they run out of supplies.

Well, here's my personal list of possible answers to the Fermi Paradox (this is assuming that, biologically, intelligence life ought to be common):
- They don't have enough resources to build technological civilizations.
- They have found a philosophy that eliminates any reason for them to develop their technology. This one is extremely unlikely.
- They blow themselves up with nukes.
- They kill themselves by polluting their environment to the point where it can no longer sustain them.
- They kill themselves with genetically engineered diseases.
- They kill themselves with reproducing nanomachines.
- They destroy themselves with high-end physics experiments. This one is extremely unlikely.
- Due to the Pioneer Anomaly or something like it, flying between star systems is a lot harder than it looks.
- Due to the Pioneer Anomaly or something like it, the rest of the Universe looks different than it actually is, our biology doesn't apply properly, and other intelligences don't exist.
- They're concealing themselves from us and waiting for us to develop our civilization before they reveal themselves. This one is fairly unlikely.
- They all plug themselves into computers and play massive multiplayer games because it's so much cheaper and easier and more effective than physically expanding their civilization.
- Stars are alive and when other civilizations try to alter their star in order to benefit them, the star kills them.
- They have all opened protals to another universe with far superior resources and abandoned this universe.
- The first intelligent civilization in any given universe always takes over its universe and turns it all into a giant computer, and then simulates another universe where the same thing happens, etc.
I may be able to add more later. For now, I think this will suffice. Feel free to discuss.

Rather than cooling down, most manned spaceships actually have problems with staying too hot. Also, at 20% of the speed of light it takes a max of maybe 100 years to get to any given star in our galaxy from the closest neighboring star. 100 years isn't nearly enough for the ships to have problems with heating.

Except that there are thousands, if not millions, of 'they'. The chances of us being first, especially in a galaxy this large and this old, is ridiculously small.

There are plenty of reasons why they might not want to contact us in particular.


Where did you get those statistics?

The statistics are from a book I recently read, which gave out the exact statistics. Currently I have loaned the book to a family member. I'll try to explain it as best as I can.

Say a species sends out colonizing missions to several planets around it. After the colonies grow to sustain themselves, the new colonies send out waves to colonize more planets. The rate of colonization would be exponential. Put in the factors of how long it takes the colony to be able to launch its onw waves, and how fast the ships travel, you can attempt to calculate how long it would take to colonize the Galaxy.

Scientists estimate we can only see roughly 4% of whats around us. We probably can't see the aliens if they are out there.

You have to take into consideration that
A) Not every planet is habitable.
and
B) Not every star has planets.

First, we have to single out stars that are young/small/cool enough to keep at least one their planets in a habitable life zone. A%

Next, we have to see how many of those stars actually have planets. B% of our initial A%.

We have to now break down those planets into ones that actually COULD sustain life. C% of B%

Planets that do sustain life. D% of C%

Those planets which have life, is it intelligent enough to abandon it's home planet? E% of D%

Those planets which are in our range. F% of E%

Even if each of those percents is 90, taking a sample of 1,000,000,000, we'd only have 53,1441,000 budding stellar civilizations, just over 53%. And 90% is impossibly high. (On a random note, those numbers are the 4,998th and 4,999th cube numbers.)

Even after all that, there are countless other factors.

The thing is, look how huge the universe is. Travelling across it would take longer than the universe has been in exsitence (Dunno how to spell that word;)). And also, other extra terrestial beings would have to evolve, they can't just start off really advanced. It can be compared to a game of starcraft. It's not like you suddenly spawn 30 battlecruisers, you have to build yourself up, all the while protecting yourself from various things like Zerg in the game, meteors and diseases on the planet.
I think that if there is someone out there, they haven't had the time to reach us.

There's a big difference between life and sentient life... Who's to say that ET organisms out there will be intelligent enough to even have a civilization?

Its all in the Odds, i think its imprbable to think there isnt another planet out there with life like our own, but then everything else is just to much to think its all about what are the odds of that really happening. In the end we have no clue!

What 4% are you talking about?

If you mean the observable Universe as compared to the actual Universe, the observable Universe is probably a lot more than 4% of the size of the actual Universe and even if it isn't it's still quite big enough for lots of other civilizations to exist.

If you mean normal matter and normal energy as opposed to dark matter and dark energy, well, again it doesn't matter (no pun intended) because our civilization is made of normal matter and that's the kind we're talking about. It's not like the aliens can hide themselves behind dark matter or something.

Maybe we won't. Each colony and ship could hold a copy of an artificial intelligence program which governs the people and always retains the same basic goals, so everything would run smoothly even though no one would know what their interstellar neighbors were doing.

Besides, quantum mechanics may yet give us ways to communicate (and possibly even move) faster than light. Of course, in quantum terms, 'faster than light' doesn't really mean anything, because there is no motion involved; the information just is in one place and then is in another place (or alternatively is in both places at once).

The colony ships themselves could probably sustain life while orbiting a star. Perhaps large colony ships would be used that would stop at a planetless relay star and then send on a smaller ship to the final destination.

The thing actually is, the distances within galaxies are very small compared to the age of the Universe, and galaxies are still very big (our own galaxy has about 200 billion stars). As the travel time goes up linearly, the area you can cover in that time goes up by the cube, so it very quickly (in terms of the age of the Universe) becomes enormous, with the potential for many civilizations within that area.

Let's assume we are within a few thousand years (a negligible amount of time) of achieving interstellar travel technology which can allow us to colonize at 10% of the speed of light. That means we can cross the Milky Way in only a million years. In other words, if anyone else in our galaxy was even only one million years ahead of us (one million years being only 0.00007 times age of the Universe), we should already have met them.

Again, there are millions of 'they'. For every hundred or thousand or whatever that didn't develop intelligence, there'll be one that did. And one is enough.

I don't know for sure. The thing is. We haven't found a alien life form yet. And if we have, public would not know.

my vision of the future is exactly like this

Why should they contact us? If you see a mentally ill person, would you immediately go over to him and start being friends? We are retards compared to aliens with the technology to travel between worlds so they probably want nothing to do with us.

LOL thats probably true!

And what do you know of dark matter?

I was simply saying we can only see things that shine light at us, aliens don't do that nearly as well suns.

But if you did see a small ant, you would poke it with a stick and see it run around in a crazy fashion.

If I saw one ant that stood out among all of the other ants, then maybe. But if all of the ants looked and acted generally the same, then I wouldn't give a dam about them and maybe step on a few on my way (unintentionally) if i were going somewhere

So to aliens, what makes us so special from all of the other aliens out there? We are probably so uninteresting that it disgusts them and makes them believe that it would do us good to get exterminated

No, it's not a matter of not hearing from them again. Just a matter of not hearing from them just as things happen for them.

Not retards. More like animals. And we keep pets, don't we?

Besides, just because they don't want to bother contacting such stupid, primitive beings doesn't mean they'll deliberately hide themselves from us. Any large civilization should radiate a whole lot of signals which even we could pick up with our telescopes. Sort of like how, even if we don't want to bother contacting ants, the ants can still see all our cars driving by and smell their exhaust and so on.

Enough to know that the vast majority of aliens are almost certainly not hiding behind it.

Actually, if by 'light' you mean any electromagnetic radiation, then the aliens would do that much better in certain frequencies than stars would. The Sun releases trillions of times more visible light than the Earth does, but unless I'm mistaken the Earth has been emitting thousands of times as much radio waves as the Sun has for about 100 years now. If the aliens turn off the visible light telescopes and turn on the radio ones, the Sun essentially disappears and the Earth becomes quite bright.

Well, you must admit we're a lot more interesting than all the bare, lifeless planets out there, pretty much no matter what kind of alien is watching us.

I wish we were the first sentient beings in this entire universe.

That would be pretty sad, since there would be no one to guide us as we evolve technologically and as a civilization

I can confidently say there is "aliens" out there, I doubt they will ever contact earth in our lifetime though. Its possible alien technology would allow them to communicate with us at the moment, but I'm not ready to predict that an invisible alien spaceship is ganna land on earth tomorrow. Basically my theory is: Aliens exist, we cannot predict when they will contact us, or if they ever will. We can predict its going to be awhile before we find them. I'm guessing past my lifetime.

It doesn't matter if the chances of a planet supporting sentient life are 0.00000001. The Universe is infinite and expanding.