The Fermi Paradox - Are We Alone in the Universe

[Calvin Locke]

My theory is that a number of civilizations have come and gone. The last detectable radio transmission passed the
Earth the night before Marconi finally got something working.

And any civilization the managed to pass through the "social consciousness" stage survived long enough to migrate to younger
stars and is smart enough to avoid civilizatoins that produce activists in general, activist judges in
particular, the DNC, and religions that can't quite seem to progress beyond the gutter of the universe (I'll be happy
to re-evaluate after a reformation or two, but I fear our star will go Red Giant first...)

[dangus]

You presume a Type II Dyson sphere. Dyson said what he foreaw was a loose collection of over 100,000 objects traveling on independent orbits. Dyson also predicted a Type III sphere called a ringworld, which would require only the amount of matter of a large asteroid, and yet would capture a significant portion of a star's energy.

Actually, come to think of it, even a handful of solar collectors would technically fit the definition of a Type I Dyson sphere, and that has already been proposed.

[dangus]

>>They have seen the earth and how we behave and have no desire to visit here.<<

I've heard it proposed that we would likely be quarrantined. We are approaching the age of near-light speed travel, which would create the danger of photonic wakes: dangerous for unseen bystanders. But I think the person who brought this up was full of BS...

[Physicist]

Our 12-20 billion year sphere of observation is only .000000000000000000001 to the nth power (or however you phrase it) of the actual size of the universe.

Like babies, we think that what we see is what there is.

What do you mean "we", kiddo? You're a bit late in getting the the playgroup.

As for your assertion that the universe is older than it looks, that contradicts your (correct) assertion that the universe is larger than it looks. The reason the universe looks so small is because it's so young.

[RightWhale]

There are megalithic structures all over the earth as old as 10,000 years, but they are not in good repair. Anything less than megalithic structures would not last even that long. There wouldn't be much left of anything older than that. If something happened to be living here 100,000 years ago and didn't happen to build megalithic structures, it would all be gone back to nature. If we found some fossil bones, we might not recognize them as alien, especially if they were related to us in the first place.

[Calvin Locke]

Lack of "money". It's expensive to travel throughout the Galaxy.

Yeah, I have yet to see one "Altairian" dollar

I can't even find the exhange rate.

[NJ_gent]

"There isn't enough matter in the solar system, outside of mining the sun, to construct one."

Sure there is. Using the materials from the inner planets alone, we could construct a very thing Dyson sphere. Using the materials (minus the hydrogen and helium) from the outlying planets, we could construct a reasonably thick, complete Dyson shell. Wiki had some fairly reasonable calculations about it. Unfortunately, there's that little problem of gravity, the other one about heat, radiation, atmosphere, etc. All of these are impossible problems to conquer along the way.

[RightWhale]

Well, FTL and time travel and all that would be great, but at the moment we have to go with what we know how to do. Think about it, if we knew FTL were possible because we saw somebody doing it, would we not immediately do research to see how it is done? Just knowing somebody is doing it would be a valuable knowledge.

[Oberon]

We should build a Dyson Sphere. It might take 100,000 years, and it might take more engineering knowhow than we currently would consider possible to attain, but I think we could eventually do it.

Eventually, perhaps...but by the time we've solved the problems that stand in the way of building a Dyson sphere, we'll probably have easier, better ways of generating cheap energy than using a Dyson sphere.

[CharacterCounts]

Life Is Rare

Life doesn't have to be rare to answer the paradox. For life to visit other planets it must be intelligent.

Intelligent life is obviously exceedingly rare. One has to go no further than our own planet to observe this fact. If you consider life on earth from the bacteria through humans, the odds against intelligent life developing, even on a hospitable planet like ours, is in excess of a billion to one.

[PoorMuttly]

Well...Shaggy Eel and I are here...and all those Orc thingies we've been eating...

[PoorMuttly]

...do you think I said too much..?!

[RadioAstronomer]

True, but it does something else - I can't remember - perhaps it blocks asteroids or affects the magnetic fields which protect us from radiation. Its something like that.

see post #70

[antiRepublicrat]

Of course another possibility is that a "colonization" took the form of genetic seeding of planets.

Wasn't that a Star Trek Next Generation episode?

[NJ_gent]

"if we knew FTL were possible because we saw somebody doing it, would we not immediately do research to see how it is done?"

NASA's JPL does research on FTL travel and data transmission possibilities. Interesting things have crept up with oddities like quantum entanglement and the like, but nothing's as yet been concrete enough to be considered a breakthrough.

[parsifal]

Thank you for the link. I always thought universe was probably bigger.

And older. I don't get the "younger" part.

parsy, the deep thinker.

[NJ_gent]

"Wasn't that a Star Trek Next Generation episode?"

Season 6, actually: The Chase.

[Physicist]

The reason it looks so small is because the speed of light is finite. From our point of view, the stuff 13.7 billion years out is only just forming. The stuff beyond that hasn't formed yet. If the universe were older than 13.7 billion years, we'd see stuff farther out.

[general_re]

That can't be THE parsy. My, my, where on earth did you go? And did you ever solve your chicken problem? ;)

[PatrickHenry]

One possible explanation for the "no contact" situation isn't listed in the lead article: technological stagnation. An intelligent bunch of aliens could be frozen for millions of years in ancient-Egypt-like societies. Most human societies have been that way. Such societies can be very stable. It tales a wild technological leap to get to where we are. Perhaps that's what's really rare.