Were used to the idea that the night sky is mostly going to waste — that huge interstellar civilizations havent harvested the light of the stars, havent converted galaxies or galaxy clusters into carefully designed [something-aliens-want] factories. But if we werent used to the fact, the Fermi paradox, wed be right to find it stunning. There are about 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each containing about 100 billion stars. Nothing we know about the evolution of intelligent life suggests that human-like intelligence is so rare as to only arise once in that large a cosmos. And nothing we know about the feasibility of interstellar colonization predicts that, if intelligent life is common, it would consistently fail to restructure galaxies in detectable ways. And, all else being equal, we should expect that were vastly underestimating the probability of intelligent life, since most possible pathways to advanced intelligence are probably unfathomable different from our own, and therefore hard to take into consideration. So there must be something were missing. Something big. There must be some Great Filter, either in our past (making intelligences like us rare) or in our future (making most intelligences like us fail to have visible galaxy-wide impacts), thats silencing the night sky. How surprising do you think the Fermi Paradox really is? And where do you think the bulk of the Great Filter lies?
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 22:32:24 +0000
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