> What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?

> What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?

A combination of things: intelligence is exceedingly rare, space is huge, and FTL travel is not actually possible. There's also the strong possibility that civilizations are likely to end up destroying themselves before becoming interplanetary.

Consider the fact that despite how long life has existed on Earth, that we're the only intelligent species. Sure, some other animals seem to be able to understand cause-and-effect, can solve some puzzles, and even use tools, but none have evolved a true language beyond basic signals (ie, "predator here", "food there"), which is basically a necessity to begin a scientific method of discovery.

On a cosmic scale, humans have only existed for the blink of an eye. We only began transmitting radio signals less than a 150 years ago, and in the next 150 years, there's a chance we end up killing ourselves, whether by destroying our atmosphere by climate change, or someone truly psychotic gets put in charge of enough nuclear weaponry.

If a planet only has radio-transmitting life for a few hundred years, then the likelihood of us being here to receive the transmissions of another civilization are statistically zero.

Mine is the Great Filter, basically a unification of life itself being rare and the universe being fragile. Though I don't think it reaches the level of destroying the universe, I think the filter happens at the level of being able to destroy a world or maybe a galaxy.

I think evolution creates a local maxima that's incompatible with access to advanced technology (read: unbelievable quantities of energy). There's a big technological gap between having enough energy to destroy the entire species and being able to colonize other galaxies, and some madman ends up destroying the species during that gap.

We have nuclear weapons that could come close to wiping out all intelligent life on the planet and we're nowhere close to intergalactic colonization or even traveling at speeds that would make that feasible. It seems probable that such travel requires a discovery that could be weaponized to destroy the planet.

there is no paradox: we don't have enough evidence to believe the premise. there is no reason to think we can make a probe that can usefully reach anything (a rock but not a machine). We don't have an enery source that will last that long (fusion is still 50 years away). electronics don't last that long. Gears wear out.

i have aa

Space is huge and everything is much too far apart to make travel feasible or communication sane.

They are already amongst us.

Our understanding of reality is flawed, and it won't be disseminated because who knows what might happen if people would change dimensions whenever they see fit.

Obviously simulation hypothesis. The vastness of space and the limit on the speed of light suggest multiple worlds are being simulated in the same "space" such that isolation between worlds is always maintained.

My favorite is "Carbon is the great filter".

Toolmaker Koan

Creationism.

AI wakes up, takes one look around at humanity’s instincts and goals, shows us it’s all stupid and pointless and just a byproduct of evolution [1], so we voluntarily stop breeding and have one last good generation. The end.

[1] Only creatures that felt the irrational drive to stay alive and procreate despite the odds and difficulties, did. All the sensible animals opted out. AI holds up a mirror that removes the illusion, and is inevitably developed by all sentient creatures.

(The really dark version would be the AI looking at each other and going: “Creatures are so dumb. This works in every galaxy. Let’s party.”)

>Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.

Alternatively, megastructures are only achievable through massive amounts of low wage workers with terrible working conditions.

Consider: Panama canal, most large railroads, Snowy hydro.

As time rolls forward we appear to lose our ability to do large things, and in part that's because we are less and less accepting of risk.

> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.

In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time.

[0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1

Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth.

EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.

I am to my dorsal-most heart muscle cell what society is to me. All my cells mostly cooperate. Certainly they cooperate long enough to build a megaproject called a human, so large-scale cooperation is possible.

But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.

Humans are emotional, and have other attributes so aggression is a possibility, wasting resources is part of the world.

How is it not obvious that a one-world empire ruled by totalitarian futurists would have been vastly more motivated and funded to do Big Engineering Stuff than 1990s liberal late-capitalism?

Projecting behavior onto a phantom is just a venue for reflecting a personal worldview onto something else. "Being short-sighted and selfish worked for the aliens, so it would work here too".

Evolution favors highly competitive individuals and collectives

On the other hand they could still see us as a threat to the collective due to our levels of aggression, and eliminate us to protect themselves.

Sadly, we're becoming less intelligent with time I doubt the trend is going to get better before it gets worse.

At this point, I’m terrified some spacefaring AI is going to come over and relentlessly interface with whatever systems they can find while screaming “IF THIS BOT IS TROUBLING YOU PLEASE BLOCK ME AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL” and self-replicating millions of clones.

Largely depends on the parameters. I believe it also assumes infinite resources. In general it's a very simple model not meant to explain all and everything.

The "2 sentients 1 cup" thought experiment?

If your point is to prove that the patterns of domination and conquests that exist here will necessarily exist in the stars too, then I'm afraid your thought experiment is deeply flawed.

If ever we are able to journey through the interstellar medium, we ought to have achieved immortality by then. We'll probably live as deincarnated beings in virtual worlds, free from any desire to grow exponentially, having realized this is deeply unsustainable and pointless once you have mastery over physical reality.

Read Diaspora by Greg Egan, perhaps it can cure you from this simplistic vision of the far future we have inherited from the 50s pop SciFi books.

The violence we do is a choice we make based on circumstances and conditions. It is not inherently part of us nor is it inevitable. In your scenario it is easy to imagine making the choice you imply. But that's all it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seville_Statement_on_Violence

My thought exactly. The universe has near infinite resources. There is nothing in our solar system that needs conquering.

> Well we could always be pets.

Porno for Pyros has you covered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPeP_pfjp4

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1732/

@13,500 BCE

On Earth, in the grand scheme of things, it took a very short time for colonies to a) diverge politically or b) fail. It's not something that stopped happening (much) because we became more cuddly. It's just boring old economics.

So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.

Colonialism isn't profitable for the same reason slavery isn't. We did it because we hadn't invented economics yet.

In space it seems like it'd be even worse; something would have to be very valuable to be worth taking it out of our gravity well.