Fermi paradox?

neosapien said:
Where is everybody? Looking at the way things are going here on earth, I think it's rather plausible the answer is all intelligent life blows itself up before it figures out light speeds. Pretty damn interesting query. What are your thoughts on why no alien tits for neo?
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The smart ones faked planetary disaster and then went full stealth to avoid being eaten by the almost-as-smart ones.
 
neosapien said:
Where is everybody? Looking at the way things are going here on earth, I think it's rather plausible the answer is all intelligent life blows itself up before it figures out light speeds. Pretty damn interesting query. What are your thoughts on why no alien tits for neo?
Click to expand...

Even light speed would be painfully slow when you consider the vast distances of just interstellar travel. If life is plentiful throughout the cosmos, I'm sure some, if not most, civilizations destroy themselves before they can populate their local systems. But even the ones that don't - there would be diminishing returns on how far (i.e. how long) they travel outward to explore/mine/conquer/whatever. Even if their lifespans were millennia, who would want to spend most or all of that traveling at light speed across the cosmos? The odds are we would never meet another such civilization, even if they are plentiful. Intelligent life would have to bend/fold spacetime, or discover naturally occurring wormholes, in order to really travel vast distances. Or something like that, I'm pretty stoned...
 
raratt said:
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tyler.durden said:
Even light speed would be painfully slow when you consider the vast distances of just interstellar travel. If life is plentiful throughout the cosmos, I'm sure some, if not most, civilizations destroy themselves before they can populate their local systems. But even the ones that don't - there would be diminishing returns on how far (i.e. how long) they travel outward to explore/mine/conquer/whatever. Even if their lifespans were millennia, who would want to spend most or all of that traveling at light speed across the cosmos? The odds are we would never meet another such civilization, even if they are plentiful. Intelligent life would have to bend/fold spacetime, or discover naturally occurring wormholes, in order to really travel vast distances. Or something like that, I'm pretty stoned...
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Let’s pretend for a bit that we will never do better than, say, a fusion rocket confined to normal space. A colony ship could accelerate to about 300 km/s and retain a braking and maneuvering reserve. This gives a cruise of 0.1% lightspeed. Alpha Centauri in 4500 years. Sirius in fifteen thousand. Orion with its Eldorado of volatiles in under a million.

I believe that if our culture lasts another millennium, we will have the technology to build seed ships (Niven already used the lovely word “starseed” for a deep-space life form) that contain von Neumann starter hardware for the technical and biological sides of society. The crew could be millions, living full lives as data. The entire ship, not counting propulsion, could be the size of an average car.

I also believe that we will leave the planet ... and planets period. The raw material for life and tech is vastly more common and easier to access in deep space than planetary resources. Planets are the cradles of life and mind. We will eventually need to sanitize the motherworld and give the next presapient species an honest chance. The premium real estate will be in the Oort Cloud.

Life must expand. It is an imperative at the level of puddles and entire worlds. We are the sapients in this system, at least the unstealthed ones. Maybe not the first or last from this world. Our biological destiny is to send at least two successful colony ships away from our star and its neighborhood. We could cover the galaxy in less than twenty million years, speciatin’ like fruit flies all the while.

Unless a fucking Apex Predator gunboat decloaks next to a first-wave seed ship ... then we’re comprehensively toast.
 
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