What is the Fermi paradox?
“The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.”
Basically, what we see in the first part of the paradox is the argument that the universe is fucking huge. There are supposed to be around 300,000,000,000 stars just in our galaxy. The crazy scientists are saying in the visible universe there are roughly 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. That’s seventy sexxxtillion stars. We are one planet around one star within the visible universe. We’re also going to assume that Earth isn’t necessarily a special little flower. It is a typical planet with the same laws/rules/whatever that govern other worlds.
So basically if the universe has existed for 14 billion some odd years there should be other civilizations out there. Also, if interstellar travel is possible, at current Earth’s speed of space travel it would take a maximum of 50-75 million years to colonize all the Milky Way galaxy’s inhabitable planets. That’s about .5% of the time that it has existed. Even if colonization isn’t the goal other intelligent species would still have explored. However, we still haven’t found signs of colonization or exploration within our galaxy or any of the universe we have been able to view.
We could also even argue that travel times alone could explain that we haven’t seen a presence of intelligent life across the universe. Then the question is, why don’t we see signs? An advanced, exploring or colonizing civilization would probably be observable over a noticeable size of the observable universe. Even if it doesn’t happen often, those civilizations should have existed at some point and since they could be detected from far, far away and long, long ago.
If you’re interested, Carl Sagan has written tons on the subject. Also, you can look up the Drake Equation if you want a more scientific way of looking at it.
There are tens of arguments on the subject, what are your thoughts?
