What's your explanation to the Fermi paradox?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startsw.../#2f3aff5c7d3b


Link above is an old, but fun, article...

All correct except for, the "no convincing evidence".

Truth be know Fermi is an alien (American born of Italian decent).

It's impossible for someone to win a debate when all they spout is batshit crazy, and easily debunkable "theories", and then when their "theories" are debunked, the spouter moves the goalposts again and again in their quest for a "victory" that will only ever exist in their minds.

John Cleese explains the idea behind this better than anyone on here can, so take it away John.

Statistically, there gotta be a chance Whatto is shufflin' a pair of roo-themed socks from the back of his drawer to the front at precisely the same moment I am undergoing a bloo bra spree from left to right.


Could be the spectacle hoomanity needs to draw the bug-eyed critters outta their invisibyool yoofoes.

Can anyone say Butterfly Effect.

... and another can of worms gets opened.

Gotta say the Butterfly Effect ain't always the ansa to the Fermi paradox.


It's a huge blow to science, I know -- but naht evrywan is Einstein.


(I know we got all kindsa philosophy stuffs say you can't even prove Einstein was Einstein, but that brings us back dead square to the aliens, don't it?)


Huh -- it is only Wednesday an' my poor, sweet braino is drippin' outta my eyeballs already ...

Your question sounds sincere...so here is my take on it.

It's not a paradox. It's a series of suppositions. Each relying on the previous one to be true.

But any of these can be torn apart by a rational person. Here's just one example;

"Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step humans are investigating now."

This statement assumes a series of massively improbable occurrences, depending on all of them to be true.

It assumes that Earthlike planets will have life. It assumes that these planets will develop humanoid life. It assumes that this life would have brains that work like ours, the same senses we have, the same level of intelligence. for that to occur, the planet and star couldn't be "like" ours. They would have to be identical to ours.

And humanoid life only evolved on Earth, in exactly the same evolutionary path, after an impossibly long and complex series of occurrences, mass extinctions, climate events, geological events, survival of small groups of hominids...with one (of dozens) of species of hominid eventually becoming intelligent enough to create any technology at all.

And the first 100,000-200,000 years we were here, our technology consisted of spears and rocks.

It assumes that this improbable human like species would develop technology along the exact same complex path that we did, with the same materials, the same goals, the same desires.

It assumes that interstellar travel is possible. It assumes that it is worth paying for, it assumes that this travel would find another earthlike planet. It assumes the craft would survive the journey.

It assumes that we are really interested in interstellar travel. It states that we "investigating it now". We are not. We are imagining it. We are fantasying about it. We are imagining the technology involved.


And...this doesn't take into account the impossibly vast distances between stars.

Let's pretend that 1% of the stars have an Earth like planet. That's a wildly generous assumption. Meaning a planet that could allow for a humanoid intelligent life form to evolve and survive.

Let's pretend that all of these planets have humanoid life...all of them have developed technology...all of them have mastered interstellar flight at close to the speed of light.

Even at the speed of light, it would take thousands of years to reach the next "Earthlike planet". And that's assuming you know where they are.

And this is just one supposition in the string of suppositions in the "Fermi paradox".

The only reason anyone takes this seriously is because the word "paradox" implies a mystery...something unknown. It stirs the imagination. And it sound vaguely "scientific" because it uses a few science words. After every line in the Fermi paradox, the most rational thing someone can say is "Well, I guess that makes sense".

But none of the guesses in the paradox are facts. None of them have even been reasoned out. They assume things that aren't true....a list of guesses strung together to get people talking.


But there are no paradoxes. Only mistakes in reasoning that haven't been caught yet.

So far every "paradox" I've seen has one mistake in logic...or one wrong premise. And as soon as that is spotted, the paradox ceases to exist.

This "paradox" is the first one I've seen that makes a long list of mistaken leaps in logic...each one depending on all the others to be true for support.

A web of nothing.

Added later; The exception to the "Web of nothing' about the Fermi Paradox is the first statement.

"There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun." It does not depend on all the other statements to be true, to make sense.

But it says "Similar to the Sun"....which makes me ask "Similar in what way?" Does that mean the same size? The same brightness? The same composition?

I strongly suspect that this could be just about any star that isn't a binary star. But most stars are binary stars. And most stars that are alone are red dwarf stars...which put out very little heat...and a lot of radiation. Not suitable for a planet to evolve life. Larger stars than ours burn faster. The giants burn out within a few million years. Not enough time for the planets to even form a crust, let alone life to evolve.

The star would have to be nearly identical with ours to be this stable, put out the same combination of light, heat, and solar radiation. And have to have at least one planet, about the size of Earth, in a stable orbit (not elliptical) the same distance from the star as we are from ours.

That would be rare in the extreme. There would still be a million planets like that, but so far apart that travel to them would be highly improbable.