> All we have is our current understanding of things, and the paradox is simply going
Actually based on what I’ve learned about it, the paradox is actually doing both things: it’s assuming over enough time scale our technology evolves rapidly enough to unlock new physics to traverse the universe we don’t have today while simultaneously being able to detect it using insanely primitive technology by comparison. It would be like asking someone to detect an atomic explosion in our solar system in 1930 - an explosion we’d likely not even notice today I suspect. There’s simply not enough understanding, we’re monitoring too little of the universe, and the equipment to do the monitoring is too primitive if technology really continues to advance at the pace posed by the Fermi paradox.
Basically the Fermi paradox says “after the invention of modern science and Industrial Revolution, within a couple of hundred of years we were flying, within 50 years we’d left orbit and within 20 years or so we’d reached a moon. So surely after a few hundred thousand years the society should be able to reach and have colonized huge swaths of the galaxy”. But that kind of advancement would be at odds with our ability to detect such signatures and what we’re doing today is hypothesizing crazy sci-fi ideas and looking for those signatures with insanely primitive tools that have poor resolution. Communication we have 0 chance of spotting (encryption + energy efficiency = noise). Dyson spheres are interesting to look for but it’ll be a while before some novel ideas for how to spot them pan out (and that’s assuming the clever ideas are correct about what the footprint would look like and that Dyson spheres would be needed for long distance travel vs wormholes).
However based on our current understanding of technology long distance travel is simply not possible - the Milky Way itself is 100k light years across. Even at 10% light speed that’s 1 million years to traverse the galaxy and ignores the challenges (surfing that kind of distance traveling at such speeds and avoiding all kinds of things flying through space). And visiting (let alone building major hubs) various star systems is going to take significantly more than that. If you can only manage 1% then that’s a 10 million year undertaking just to go from one end to another. It’s easy to imagine that visiting many star systems would take billions of years and that’s with technology we don’t know we can even build. And ignoring the practical challenges of going that fast, needing to survive, decelerating, and ignoring the economics of creating a craft that can undertake and last a 100k year journey at relativistic speeds.
And saying we don’t have scientists working on this actually proves my point that there’s no paradox - no one is really working on this problem using very poor sensors trying to think as creatively as they can with basically 0 knowledge (compared to a civilization many thousands of years older than us) for signals we don’t know how or where to look for. So of course we haven’t found anything.
Your entire post here is making a lot of incorrect assumptions about the paradox. As the other guy said, it's not some rigorous thing, but you're definitely not the first guy to think "Well... what if FTL travel isn't possible?" or "What if every single technological species in the entire universe all decided to hide their messages since their inception somehow?".
A million years in a cosmological timescale is nothing. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and we only came in right at the end. If we'd come in 200 Million years earlier, we'd have covered many, many galaxies by now - we could expand in all directions pretty much simultaneously.
This doesn't even begin to get into your assumption that every species in the universe would even WANT to hide - the concept of "territory" isn't exactly foreign to us. We don't need to prove that there IS a species acting this way to solve the paradox, we need to explain why NO species is doing this, or if they are, why NONE are putting up markers in a manner that's easy for everyone to see?
I never said it's a rigorous thing; I'm highlighting that there's too many flaws to take seriously (i.e. evidence of absence in this case tells us nothing).
Remember - it's a million to do a straight shot across the universe at quite a large portion of the speed of light. In terms of colonization we're talking billions of years for an unknown fraction of the galaxy, but definitely not the entire thing. And much of the galaxy may not even be suited for colonization (e.g. presumably you still need some raw resources & have to be careful about where you go to to expand)
As for "hiding" I never said they want to hide. But you only need to look at the modern world to realize that digital communication and encryption are standard fare and "hiding" is a natural evolution of that. And the longer distances you are transmitting and the more signals you need to monitor, the more energy efficient you want to be (i.e. point to point + relays instead of broadspectrum broadcasts). And if advanced civilizations use neutrino comms or quantum entaglement somehow, then they'd naturally be hidden just because that's how more advanced tech would work.
As for territory, I never said they wouldn't be territorial. But a lion isn't going to bother being territorial with a mouse. No reason to believe they're going to try to broadcast ownership in a way that a "stone age" species like ours could detect. Additionally, it's not impossible that communication barriers are real and therefore there's not really much to communicate out vs "show up in our heavily fortified star system & see disappear" kind of behavior.
The counter argument is that you may actually want to hide unless you're the apex civilization because otherwise the apex civilization may choose to conquer and murder yours (e.g. Europeans vs Native Americans) to prevent competition.
My point is that there's so many reasons that we're not finding anything (nonexistent priors, searching in the wrong spot, search for the wrong signals, not having enough people searching, having the wrong equipment, not even having the physics required to start searching, etc etc) that the Fermi paradox provides no insight & can't even be called a paradox yet.
If faster than light travel is possible, this changes a lot of calculus of course. But similarly, is there any reason to believe our solar system would be interesting enough for the species to come to us? Or maybe there's even political things like Star Trek's first contact rule that put us in a bubble & intentionally mask the existence of the aliens in the first place.
Your statements are framed as arguments, like in a debate. But it’s clear to most, at least clear to the down voters and the other responders, that you haven’t thought about or investigated these concepts. Instead of writing many argumentative paragraphs, spend that time asking ChatGPT specific questions or skimming some Wikipedia articles. Some people don’t like to read, they’d rather explore ideas by arguing about them. But that’s a drain on discussions, not an addition to it.
E.g.(paraphrased) “my point is the Fermi paradox is dumb”- no physicists think that is the case. Some people on the outside, looking in, with no understanding think so. A child walks into a theatre halfway through a movie that is geared towards adults, watches for 3 minutes, and announces defiantly that the movie is dumb. Is it worth arguing with that child?
It’s good as a thought experiment to think through why we don’t see signals, but that’s about it. The Wikipedia page lists plenty of reasonable hypotheses to explain. Heck, even the explanation of the paradox itself indicates a huge problem in the radio transmissions search:
> The most sensitive radio telescopes on Earth, as of 2019, would not be able to detect non-directional radio signals (such as broadband) even at a fraction of a light-year away,[49] but other civilizations could hypothetically have much better equipment.
So we don’t even have equipment that could detect equivalent passive signals from our planet in the nearest other solar system. And our planet is increasingly not emitting loud broadband signals instead preferring fiber optics and point to point links for bandwidth and efficiency reasons (+ encryption).
I have yet to find anyone who believes that the Fermi paradox is real who bothers to offer a justification that doesn’t rely on assumptions about FTL or completely ignore the practical challenges of we’re not even seriously looking and don’t really know what to look for let alone the serious practical challenges that interstellar travel could be a huge barrier since we don’t even have a counter that such travel is indeed possible (eg even our furthest probe which required a confluence of orbital mechanics to make that speed possible in the first place would need to travel ~500x longer just to reach the nearest solar system).
I’m glad insulting me makes you feel good but pointing me at convincing counter arguments to theist basic practical counter arguments might be a better use of time if you found any that are so obviously compelling.
“It’s only good as a thought experiment”. Framed as an argument. Did you notice you’ve switched sides? The Theseus ship paradox has at least 2 perfectly good answers, Is it dumb?
Another responder already gave you what you’re asking for: billion year timescales. You countered “500x”. Did you multiply 500 times x (47) and compare that to a billion? You latched onto that idea eagerly because it supported “your side”, but I’m sure once you think about it you’ll see it’s only a tiny fraction of a real counter argument.
You mistake me for an opponent. Me insulting you would look different. You’re the only one that can benefit from these comments I’m making to you.
> So we don’t even have equipment that could detect equivalent passive signals from our planet in the nearest other solar system. And our planet is increasingly not emitting loud broadband signals instead preferring fiber optics and point to point links for bandwidth and efficiency reasons (+ encryption).
Sure. Which is why no one particularly expects broadband radio signals to be the first indication we find of other intelligent life out there. Narrowband signals, particularly pulsed ones, are one of the (relatively) more likely indicators, but these are still very much a "We are doing radio astronomy already and the same sort of weirdness we would expect from intelligent life is already the sort of weirdness we're looking for for a variety of other reasons, so doing a bit more to differentiate between that and other phenomena is cheap. Pulsars are a good example here - pulsars are cool and we get excited when we find new ones, but they're the sort of oddity that could be quite similar to what we would see from intelligent life.
Radio gets a lot of discussion here for a couple of reasons - the first being that we can just look at a whole lot of it, for the previously mentioned reasons, but also because it plays a bit into the whole human tendency to get excited about things that make them a little afraid. WE'VE been broadcasting out to the universe so people imagine a bit what might happen if someone out there is listening. There's the whole Dark Forest hypothesis, so maybe we've signed our own death warrant by leaking these radio waves! Probably not, but it can be entertaining to talk about, so people do.
But in general, most scientists really only expect to learn of intelligent life via radio transmissions if someone is specifically attempting to talk to us, regardless of whether or not life is ubiquitous in the galaxy or universe at large.
> I have yet to find anyone who believes that the Fermi paradox is real who bothers to offer a justification that doesn’t rely on assumptions about FTL or completely ignore the practical challenges of we’re not even seriously looking and don’t really know what to look for let alone the serious practical challenges that interstellar travel could be a huge barrier since we don’t even have a counter that such travel is indeed possible (eg even our furthest probe which required a confluence of orbital mechanics to make that speed possible in the first place would need to travel ~500x longer just to reach the nearest solar system).
Again, "believers" in the fermi paradox (this is still a REALLY WEIRD way to frame the discussion! people don't talk about it in this manner!) don't have some firm belief that there aren't aliens out there. They might suspect that we could be the only intelligent species in the galaxy but I've never seen or read of any scientist that talks about this subject going "nope no way intelligent life exists in our neighborhood we would 100% have seen it if it did!" - and this is a subject I find interesting so I've read a lot of writing and listened to a lot of talks on this subject.
But no one is ignoring the possibility of FTL or the idea that we might have no idea what to actually look for. Hell, maybe there's just no reason to expand to any significant portion of the galaxy - perhaps most civilizations focus on becoming hyper efficient in their resource utilization and only expand as absolutely necessary, or download their consciousnesses into a simulation, or whatever. But human nature has been to expand to everywhere we can, and humans are the only "advanced" intelligence we can go off of - so colonizing the galaxy seems like a reasonable thing to assume other species might do, based on our own experiences. And you don't need FTL or even travel that goes at a significant fraction of the speed of light to have colonized much of the galaxy on the timeframes we're talking. The Milky Way is 13.6 billion years old and we know of planets that formed quite early in the Milky Way's history. Now, we think that it would have been tough for anywhere in the galaxy to have been particularly habitable until 6 billion years ago or so, but Earth is about 4.5b years old - there's a whole lot of planets that would have had a 1.5b year head start to get to where we are now. 1.5 billion! Even at 1% the speed of light and not using anything like von neumann probes that's a lot of time to do a whole lot of colonizing. And we're pretty sure that our current understanding of technology could let us build something that reaches 8-10% the speed of light via nuclear pulse propulsion. Give us a hundred thousand years, much less a million, and we've not even scratched the surface of our time budget and we'd almost certainly have technology that would let us go even faster.
Actually based on what I’ve learned about it, the paradox is actually doing both things: it’s assuming over enough time scale our technology evolves rapidly enough to unlock new physics to traverse the universe we don’t have today while simultaneously being able to detect it using insanely primitive technology by comparison. It would be like asking someone to detect an atomic explosion in our solar system in 1930 - an explosion we’d likely not even notice today I suspect. There’s simply not enough understanding, we’re monitoring too little of the universe, and the equipment to do the monitoring is too primitive if technology really continues to advance at the pace posed by the Fermi paradox.
Basically the Fermi paradox says “after the invention of modern science and Industrial Revolution, within a couple of hundred of years we were flying, within 50 years we’d left orbit and within 20 years or so we’d reached a moon. So surely after a few hundred thousand years the society should be able to reach and have colonized huge swaths of the galaxy”. But that kind of advancement would be at odds with our ability to detect such signatures and what we’re doing today is hypothesizing crazy sci-fi ideas and looking for those signatures with insanely primitive tools that have poor resolution. Communication we have 0 chance of spotting (encryption + energy efficiency = noise). Dyson spheres are interesting to look for but it’ll be a while before some novel ideas for how to spot them pan out (and that’s assuming the clever ideas are correct about what the footprint would look like and that Dyson spheres would be needed for long distance travel vs wormholes).
However based on our current understanding of technology long distance travel is simply not possible - the Milky Way itself is 100k light years across. Even at 10% light speed that’s 1 million years to traverse the galaxy and ignores the challenges (surfing that kind of distance traveling at such speeds and avoiding all kinds of things flying through space). And visiting (let alone building major hubs) various star systems is going to take significantly more than that. If you can only manage 1% then that’s a 10 million year undertaking just to go from one end to another. It’s easy to imagine that visiting many star systems would take billions of years and that’s with technology we don’t know we can even build. And ignoring the practical challenges of going that fast, needing to survive, decelerating, and ignoring the economics of creating a craft that can undertake and last a 100k year journey at relativistic speeds.
And saying we don’t have scientists working on this actually proves my point that there’s no paradox - no one is really working on this problem using very poor sensors trying to think as creatively as they can with basically 0 knowledge (compared to a civilization many thousands of years older than us) for signals we don’t know how or where to look for. So of course we haven’t found anything.