Hell, we can’t even recognize sapience and sentience in other terrestrial species, what makes us think we’d recognize it in extraterrestrials?
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It is changing slowly.
But for now, no first contact.
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Possibility 7) We are receiving contact from other intelligent life, but the government is hiding it.
This post was deleted by the author.
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The cover up disinfo campaign conspiracy goes on! !!!11!!!1!!ONZE!
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Of course it keeps growing. Technology is progressing and they keep upgrading the server this simulation is running on.
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Is it full of stars?
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Another reminder of just how big just our solar system is:
https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
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Had a thought the other day, which may be a variation on possibilities 4 or 5, namely:
Given how trivial it would seem to be for a spacefaring-level civilization to obliterate life on a given planet, the likelihood of any contact between advanced civilizations resulting in mutually assured destruction could be quite high. So it’s also possible that the great filter is contact itself.
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And think about the cultural shock. Even the aliens don’t destroy our planet, the mere acknowledgement of their existence could damage our way of life. How the influence of an advanced civilization (voluntary or involuntary) would transform our society?
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Looks interesting.
My thought is: if another civilization wants an inhabited planet’s resources (or wants to eliminate a perceived threat or even nuisance) and has no qualms about destroying the life on that planet, a simple nudge of a medium-sized asteroid and Bob’s their uncle. Why deal with the bothersome civilization at all?
If the other planet’s civilization is advanced enough to be off world and able to retaliate, the same – or a rain of nuclear bombs – is going to happen to the aggressor. Basically MAD in space times 10,000. With the assumption that on cosmic timescales this MAD is a Chekov’s gun that will fire soon enough.
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The Galaxy could be running an arms race in a kind of cosmic cold war. As the universe is so vast, these so-called civilizations can explore uninhabited worlds or less advanced civilizations avoiding direct and open conflicts. I’m just afraid we’ll end up as collateral damage from a proxy war if imperialistic aliens Discover us.
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Is there really a Fermi Paradox or is our framing of the question incomplete?
If we assume that we are not an exceptional case. The explanation for the Fermi Paradox is we are among the early civilisations, and that the most common life will be the early civilisations.
The idea is that the early civilisations will expand till they find another civilization. Later there will be no place for life to develop, as all of the best places will have been colonized.
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Possibility 7) We are receiving contact from other intelligent life, but the government is hiding it.
By far the best alien conspiracy theory of all, promoted by Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defense:
At least four species of aliens have been visiting the Earth for thousands of years. VLSI silicon technology is the first phase of technology transfer. (Seriously! Consider what the present would be like if we had to run the Internet using vacuum tubes!)
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Clueless primitive human, why would we bother to visit when we can just eliminate the risk to the galaxy of a hyper-aggressive star-faring species by aiming the polar jet of a black hole in the general direction of your puny planet?
In fact, I’m not sure that Possibility 8 adequately covers this scenario.
Possibility 10) Because we are a predator species, the federation of galactic civilizations has previously placed us under quarantine, due to the extreme danger we might pose to other civilizations should we develop space travel. But, due to the absolute horror of the last century of human civilization, the planet killer death beam has now been dispatched and is travelling towards us at the speed of light even as we speak.
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He forgot about a Type IV Civilization, capable of utilizing the entire energy of a Universe.
Thats where we are.
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Commander Ashtar Sheran will help us!
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I think it’s worth trying to imagine what a flat earther makes of the Fermi Paradox. And then realize, given the constraints of our knowledge of the nature of the Universe (and the multiverse, and dark matter, and subatomic particles, and life, and intelligence and other timey wimey…stuff) we may have no more inkling to the important parameters of the Fermi Paradox than a flat earther does to how satellites work. I mean, we certainly know a lot, but haven’t humans always felt they knew a lot?
