Setekh wrote:
you seem to have missed the point of the ferme paradox.
telescopes right now are seeing farther into the past the further we look into space, we should see SOMETHING, we should hear ANYTHING from these distant places.
if superior aliens have swept across the universe in a wave of colinisation we should see SOMETHING, not a few snipers guarding an apparently empty bit of nuclear irradiated wasteland (theres somthing at "area 51" just not aliens, and i dont give a damn what my brother says about statements being changed an hour after being made, or radio contact being lost, or supersonic swamp gas)
but...nothing, nadder, zilch, sqaut, diddly,
Quote:
Especialy given that earth is not in a very dencely populated corner of the universe
so a galaxy colliding with us, and two star clusters doing likwise aint "dense" enough for ya?
You mean the Fermi Paradox?
For the benifit of the conversation
Wikipedia wrote:
The commonly held belief that the universe has many technologically advanced civilizations combined with our observations that suggest otherwise, is paradoxical, suggesting that either our understanding or our observations are flawed or incomplete.
The main example of this is the fact that we, as a species "Should" be recieving radio transmissions from other species -- some form of semi-regualar interference and we haven't found any. There are a lot of arguments for and against the fermi paradox, and it is something intersting to keep in mind while having this discussion -- i'm glad someone brought it up.
There are several solutions for the fermi paradox, one of them is that no other sapient life exists in the universe. On the other hand there is the argument (dubious that it may be) that aliens are already amoung us. This is the refutation of the fermi paradox that people believing in ufo abudctions use. Under this argument beings that are inteligent enough to get here are also inteligent enough to hide.
There are other explanations however. The main one being that there have been inteligent lifeforms who for some reason haven't communicated with us. They are deliberatly or accidentaly "hiding". Deliberatly could of course be to protect us (think star trek prime directive) or to protect themselves as if we can see them other less friendly speices could too.
Accidentaly hiding could have a lot to do with the fact that we could be recieving those transmisions and not recognising them. This is especialy true do to the effectof compression on signals. The greater the degree of compression the closer the message seems to noise.
Inteligent species, since we live for a relitively short time frame on a universal scale could also be extreamly rare and only exist too far apart in time or space to ever meet.
Additionaly broadcast technologies(ie radio tv) are not effiecent. They waste energy and they send the signal to a lot of places that it dosen't need to go. A society more advanced than ours could easily not do a significant amout of long range general broacasting. That would mean that other societies would only be detectable during the narrow period between the discovery of radio and the conversion to more effiecnt tech. Earth itself is heading quickly in this direction and soon could be in a state where we ourselves couldn't be detected through these means.
There are also other solutions.
I've heard that what was in area 51 was test planes, military test planes, which explains most of the secrecy and some of the "alien sightings"
The portion of our galaxy that we're in is sparsely populated in relation to the rest of the galaxy. We're out on one of the arms of a spiral galaxy, as opposed to say, in the center where stars are clocer together. I wouldn't say that's necessarily a bad thing -- but it does mean that there arn't any other solar systems within range of our current technology (at least not in a reasonable time frame)