I disagree with the author's statement that the Fermi paradox is "pretentious" because it assumes we have cosmic significance. I think a better word for that is "presumptuous", but pedantry aside, I don't believe the Fermi paradox ever says anything about what aliens think of humans.
It asks why there isn't more evidence of aliens anywhere we've ever looked, not about why aliens haven't come to ask us for our wisdom on philosophical matters. It's not asking why they haven't contacted us, it's asking why we can't see them, or any evidence of them. In other words, it's about the statistical likelihood of seeing evidence that should be commonplace, given the age of the universe.
He brings up the point that we might be too primitive to even notice them. Fair enough, but you could just as easily say that it's "pretentious" to say elves don't exist, because we might just be too primitive and narrow-minded to see that there is evidence of them everywhere. We have to start somewhere, and we're doing our best.
The Fermi paradox may have a built in assumption that aliens affect their world through technology, and even that they are scientifically advanced and curious enough to send probes or ships out to explore. An attack on that point would be fair. It's possible that the answer to the paradox is that humans are extremely rare in having developed any level of technology, science, or curiosity. But, that seems more pretentious to me than the alternative.
I would also like to add that Fermi’s paradox doesn’t assume humans are interesting, it just assumed probes are cheap. If probes can easily and cheaply be made to cover the galaxy (and we know that this is possible even without major breakthroughs), aliens don’t need to be excited about us to visit the neighborhood.
If aliens sent a probe to earth 1 million years ago, we'd have no way of knowing. Even if such a probe weren't destroyed or buried over that immense time span, it could be anywhere and we would have no way of knowing what to look for. Even if we were probed just a few centuries ago we'd likely be unaware - it would be quite serendipitous for an alien civilization to just happen to launch a probe such that it arrives within decades of us becoming capable of global monitoring.
It's not enough to probe every planet in the galaxy, they would have to repeatedly probe every planet in the galaxy every few centuries for us to expect to find such a probe. For how many millenia would you keep sending probes to the same backwater before you knew all you needed to know?
Hmm... If there was an earth 2, with the exact same properties, and a population of human lookalikes at the exact same level of tech as us, how far away would they need to be for us to have not detected them by now assuming we rolled a 10 for our perception check?
The Very Large Array (VLA) could pick up a broadcast from a geostationary communications satellite at a distance of 0.14 lightyears. The planned Square Kilometer Array (SKA) would be able to pick up the same signal within 500 lightyears. A radio telescope with detectors on opposite sides of the earth could pick such signals up from 2000 light years away. The nearest 2000 lightyears make up 0.16% of the milky way galaxy.
Hmm that's an interesting way to think of it. At 0.16%, assuming uniform distribution of detectable aliens and none detected in that range, that would estimate an upper bound of 625 alien species in the milky way. That does feel kind of lonely.
That would be 625 species with radio technology at approximately the same level as ours. Presumably as technology progresses, their transmitters and receivers improve whereas the distance over which they communicate stays relatively constant and thus their output power should decrease. It's also possible a more advanced civilization uses other communication methods, for example optical fiber might render satellite communications totally obsolete.
Further the 0.16% is the fraction of the galactic disk area, not stars. Also note that the 0.16% is the region we could sweep with a theoretical telescope that we might be able to build in the near future, not the region we've actually surveyed thus far.
> It's not asking why they haven't contacted us, it's asking why we can't see them
Space is vast. The strength of communication signals drops off quickly with distance. All life is subject to the laws of thermodynamics.
The Fermi paradox was proposed in 1950 during a time of rapid growth and empire. At that time, radio communications were powerful, and it seemed like they would only get more powerful as our civilization advanced. But that's not what happened. The key to better communication is not more power, but better noise reduction. Since WW2, our radio signals have become weaker and weaker and our receivers smaller as we transmit information more efficiently. Ideally we would transmit signals with the bare minimum amount of energy needed for them to be reliably received by the intended receiver. Any civilization that wants to not waste energy (read all of them) would do the same.
Because power drops off with distance, a more sensitive receiver is required to receive a message at a greater distance than the one intended, and this required improvement to sensitivity increases rapidly with greater distance.
Your cellphone communicates with an antenna approximately 2 meters in length with a maximum range of about 70 kilometers. An antenna of the same technological capability able to pick up your cellphone signal at 1 lightyear would need to be 2900 km in length. At 100 lightyears, you would need an antenna over 37,000 km long.
If you can bounce a signal off satellites, you can communicate with any point on earth - thus the most powerful radio transmissions we need to send for our own utility need to be detectable by a 4 meter dish 30000 km away in geostationary orbit. To detect such a transmission at 1 lightyear requires a receiver 203 km in diameter, at 100 lightyears a dish 2600 km in diameter. Beyond 2000 light years, you need a dish larger than Earth. If you need to communicate any further away than that, you're using highly directional beamed communication between planets which won't be detectable unless the receiver just happens to also be along that beam line.
Thus to detect a radio signal from another civilization using a telescope we could conceivably fit on our planet, one of the following must be true: the transmission must be from a relatively nearby world (0.16% of the milky way in range if they are our technological peers, less if they are more advanced than us), the transmission must use orders of magnitude more power than is necessary for communication (either they are using dramatically less advanced technology or intentional broadcast), or we need to detect highly focused beamed communication (either we get incredibly lucky or its an intentional message directed at us). It would be presumptuous to assume that aliens would set up a colony conveniently close to us, that in our mere 100 years of radio use have already greatly surpassed them, that they have maintained an active beacon for long enough that we would happen to see it, or that they would be trying to communicate with us specifically (especially given that any civilization more than a few dozen light years away would have no way of knowing that there is intelligent life on Earth.
There are of course other means of detecting life besides radio communication. Perhaps we may see pollutants in another world's atmosphere - but we have only directly detected a few thousand exoplanets thus far and observed the atmospheres of only a tiny fraction of those. Perhaps we could detect megastructures like dyson spheres - but to know what we are looking for requires a lot of assumptions about how they are built and we don't even know if they can be built. Really any sign of intelligence detectable over interstellar distances other than radio waves is purely speculative.
The assumption that evidence should be commonplace is poorly founded. Unless the universe were teeming with civilizations at a similar technology level to our own, we shouldn't expect to see anything at all.
Upvoted for a thoughtful response, but I want to be clear that I'm not saying the Fermi paradox is valid or even useful. What I'm saying is that the author of the original article argued that the paradox assumes humans are fascinating to other species, when it makes no such assumption. There may be many reasons to dismiss the Fermi paraxox, but the one he leans on the most heavily is a non sequitor.
But the whole point is that it does implicitly make that assumption. The fermi paradox is a paradox if and only if we would actually expect to see evidence of aliens. We would only expect to see evidence of aliens if they are actively trying to communicate with us. All other scenarios would require us to be extremely lucky (in which case there is no conflict with our lack of observation and thus no paradox).
If we assume that humans are fascinating, the fermi paradox is valid, if there is no interest in interacting with humans than the fermi paradox is invalid. The discussion is not a non-sequitur, it is the crux of the issue.
> All other scenarios would require us to be extremely lucky
I think I understand your position now, but I don't agree with this part. The paradox is asking "if intelligent life is common, and intelligent species invented space travel billions of years ago, wouldn't we have seen some evidence of them?"
It seems like you may disagree with the premise that it's likely we'd see evidence of them in any case. And that may be so. It's completely reasonable to say the Fermi paradox is invalid, for this or many other reasons. I don't think it was all that serious to begin with.
My objection isn't to dismissing the question, it's to the author presenting it as though it was fundamentally about human or Earth exceptionalism. I see no reason to assume that's the case.
As an illustration, does it change the nature of the question to remove Earth entirely and ask "given the age of the universe, etc., why haven't we seen evidence of alien civilizations visiting Mars? Or Titan? Or Kepler-16b?" I think it's the same paradox, it's just harder to make the point that way, since we've never been there ourselves. Asking it about Earth doesn't necessarily presume Earth is special, as the linked article suggests.
The problem is there is no way to remove earth and earth exceptionalism. The question "why haven't we seen aliens visiting mars" presupposes that we ourselves have observed mars so thoroughly that we should have expected to see such evidence. Given that we have only been closely observing mars for a few decades, either we'd have to get very lucky to see an alien visiting mars right when we just happen to be looking, or they would have to visit mars on an extremely regular basis. The fermi paradox is fundamentally about our specific lack of observation, for all we know the martians have already made contact and thus there is no paradox for them.
It asks why there isn't more evidence of aliens anywhere we've ever looked, not about why aliens haven't come to ask us for our wisdom on philosophical matters. It's not asking why they haven't contacted us, it's asking why we can't see them, or any evidence of them. In other words, it's about the statistical likelihood of seeing evidence that should be commonplace, given the age of the universe.
He brings up the point that we might be too primitive to even notice them. Fair enough, but you could just as easily say that it's "pretentious" to say elves don't exist, because we might just be too primitive and narrow-minded to see that there is evidence of them everywhere. We have to start somewhere, and we're doing our best.
The Fermi paradox may have a built in assumption that aliens affect their world through technology, and even that they are scientifically advanced and curious enough to send probes or ships out to explore. An attack on that point would be fair. It's possible that the answer to the paradox is that humans are extremely rare in having developed any level of technology, science, or curiosity. But, that seems more pretentious to me than the alternative.