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Fermi Paradox

"Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Galaxy. Within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it's quite short compared with the age of the Galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years. Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise.

So what Fermi immediately realized was that the aliens have had more than enough time to pepper the Galaxy with their presence. But looking around, he didn't see any clear indication that they're out and about. This prompted Fermi to ask what was (to him) an obvious question: "where is everybody?"  -seti.org



See this short article and video:

1.  http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/fermi-paradox
2.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJONS7sqi0o

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2 points

If we assume that Fermi is correct in thinking intelligent life could rapidly colonise the galaxy, and if we assume that if advanced life forms had colonised the galaxy we would be able to detect it from earth, then, given the fact that we have not detected any of these life forms, we must be overestimating the chances of intelligent life, or maybe any life, forming within our galaxy.

It is currently not understood how life began on earth. In order for life to start, a molecular structure must have formed that was capable of creating copies of itself. Such a structure could not be built or helped to form in any way because there couldn’t have been anything before it to guide it into the right form. I can only imagine that this structure formed by pure chance. It seems to me that such an event would be astronomically unlikely given the complexity required for any structure to reproduce itself.

But think about this: the observable universe contains at least 12 trillion galaxies, and that’s only as far as we can see. We have no idea how many more galaxies there could be beyond the horizon. The universe could be infinite or there could even be multiple universes. With so many galaxies in existence, even astronomically unlikely events will occur. Life may have started in a couple of these galaxies or it may have started in billions of them. In either case, we would know nothing about it since I doubt we could detect life outside our own galaxy.

This is a possible explanation for why we can’t see any aliens. We may well be the only life forms in our galaxy due to the incredibly small chances of life forming anywhere.

The Fermi Paradox is based on the false assumption that intelligent life is abundant, calling it a "paradox" is drastic over kill, because it's actually not that surprising that there is no galactic empire.

It takes a long ass time to even travel between solar systems, it would take roughly four years to reach the nearest star system at light steed. So even if there was another form of intelligent life it would take them quite a while to colonize an entire galaxy, plus intelligent life forming billions of years ago is less likely because the universe used to be much more chaotic.

Another problem is that life is much more rare than the Drake equation predicts, it doesn't take into account the fact that most star systems are binary or part of a cluster and are much more chaotic than ours and full of life-destroying radiation.

1 point

It takes a long ass time to even travel between solar systems, it would take roughly four years to reach the nearest star system at light steed. So even if there was another form of intelligent life it would take them quite a while to colonize an entire galaxy

Right, I have always thought it interesting because it supposes that a Ray Kurzweil type technological standard (in the final chapter of "The Singularity is Near") should just be a "given" if a civilization is far surpassed our level of advancement, however they would still have to contend with the same laws of physics and limitations that we currently know about (which appear to be exceedingly limiting). Thus, it is sensible that we have yet to find ourselves in a "Star Wars" type Galaxy. We sure as hell aren't going anywhere anytime soon

I believe aliens exist. This is all I will say on the matter. I have no proof nor do I care about their mind control of us.