Fuck The Fermi Paradox
Filed under General • 04-09-2009 •
Put simply, the Fermi paradox states that if alien civilisations exist, then at least one of them would have already made contact with us – but as they haven’t, we have to ask ourselves: where are they?
The trouble is, this is a deeply flawed argument.
How long have we had radio? A hundred years? As I write this, I’m looking at a picture of Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1672, a dusty whorl of several hundred billion stars lying more than 60 million light years away.
If a single civilisation arose in NCG 1672 and saw fit to send (for whatever reason) a radio signal in our direction, would we have equipment sensitive enough to receive it? And even if we did, 60 million light years is a long way. In order for us to receive it now, in the relatively short period of time since we discovered radio, they would have had to broadcast it at around the time the dinosaurs were dying off on Earth.
But what if they evolved some time in the last 50 million years? Or in the last 2 million years? We’d never know.
After all, how long have we been around, as a species? 100,000 years? What if they discovered radio a thousand years ago? Perhaps we’ll find out… in 60 million years’ time.
So, fuck the Fermi paradox. The answer to the question Where are they? is simply: A really, really long way away.
Given the vastness of the cosmos and the distances involved, expecting alien signals to have arrived in the eye-blink since we invented radio seems ludicrous and self-important.
It’s like landing a plane in Nairobi, sticking your head out of the cabin door and saying: “I see no lions, therefore lions must not exist.”
We may have to resign ourselves to the possibility that although there may be a million super-civilisations currently operating in the galaxies we see though our telescopes, we’ll never know.
Even if, for some unfathomable reason, they decided to send a signal our way, the human race would probably be long extinct by the time it arrived.
Tags: Aliens • Fermi Paradox • Space
it also doesn’t account for the possible existence of extra-dimensional organisms beyond our limited 4D perception.
well done.
But you’re assuming we were one of the first civilisations to exist. The universe is billions of years old, and although it couldn’t support life (as we know it) for all of that time, there could be civilisations hundreds of thousands, if not billions, of years old.
Time is a bigger factor than distance.
Heh, you don’t get it. One of the main parts of the Fermi Paradox is that if just *one* civilization developed the technology to explore space, they could colonize the entire milky way galaxy over the course of less than 100,000 years with sub light space ships. Even if they are not around, there should in theory be an overwhelming amount of evidence of aliens around.
Doesn’t help that the Earth and our solar system is located at the outer edge of the milky way. We need to get closer to the centre where all the cool kids hang out.
Thanks for joining in, Subbuttegga (if that *is* your real name
).
The flaw in the Fermi Paradox is that there are a 100 billion galaxies. If a species arose in a galaxy apart from this one, we would likely never know, as their signals would take so long to reach us.
The FP is dependent on the idea that intelligent life is common enough among those 100 billion galaxies that it will arise at least twice in ours. That implies that there must be at least 200 billion intelligent species out there.