So fun! Fraser this is the most enjoyable tier list I have ever watched. I found myself smiling through the entire 2 hour journey and was disappointed that it had to end. Excellent hosting, great colleague insights, a true RUclips gem! Thank you so much.
Agreed! It was a great conversation and exploration of philosophy of existence. I liked the rating system too. Not too serious and open minded which I loved
I think our tech is the most important bottle neck when we talk about detecting other intelligent life forms. Because light year travel time prohibits us from observing planets that are light years away in our current present time, due to the vast distance and the speed of light, any planet we observe would be a past version, not a current/present version of that planet. So complex life could have developed but all we can see is just the planet before any activity happens.
Rare Earth is definitely my number 1 choice.... Now throw in the vast distances between Earth like planets + Drake equation and civilizations are just rare and too far apart (causally disconnected).
The more I learn about biology, astronomy, geography and chemistry the more mindboggling it becomes which conditions and historical events had to be just right for complex life to even be a thing here. Could there be another civilization inside our own Galaxy? Maybe, but I wouldn't be surprised if we are among the most advanced in the universe. The fact alone that our star just happened to travel out into a relatively calm region of space and has only been disturbed just a little bit by a brown dwarf, who zipped by a few hundred thousand years ago, is crazy. could've easily been life-ending if we were in a more crowdy area.
intelligence + body form. sampling earth evo, very, very few species that could be physically capable of manipulating environ to make tech discoveries needed for advance communication. there was a dino that *maybe* with evolved intelligence could have, but there just haven't been many candidates. could be it's just an incredible outlier to develop advanced ability.
@@extollo the Silurian hypothesis hasn't been completely ruled out. Imagine a naturally very skittish smaller dino got pretty advanced at some point and they went underground when things got bad. All the while they just kept on advancing and being perfectly content living underground. Might even be under a kilometer of ice for all we know and they are probably not very large in numbers either. Then all of a sudden they get spooked by our underground nuclear tests. I mean, that definitely would have been a "wow, what are those underdeveloped hairy apes doing? Better start keeping an eye on them" hence all the UAP-sightings near Nuclear facilities.
I think the grabby alien's hypothesis is pretty compelling to us being among the first. I guess you could call this one Rare Intelligence too. I liked Dakotah's answer here about the hard steps from going from simple life to complex. It really is one of the single best pieces of data that we have towards the answer to the Fermi Paradox. That combined with the null results from all our searches, the other big piece of data we have, is basically the grabby aliens hypothesis. I think both of these should be S-tier. If you are reading this and haven't heard of the grabby alien's hypothesis, search for the video from PBS Spacetime. It is a good summary. You can also find the paper titled Grabby Aliens where they walk through their full argument and the math behind it. It is pretty easy to read in terms of science papers, and is very compelling.
How would they know? Life on the Earth and Earth civilization are undetectable from the closest star much less anywhere else. Also interstellar travel is quite literally impossible so menacing aliens cannot get here if they wished to eat us all.
Any ETI that knows of us and views us as a threat will resort to a relativistic kill weapon. The kill-shot will come at us at or very near the speed of light. We’ll have vanishingly little time to react, very little chance of saving ourselves even if we do react. Given that Earth has been broadcasting the presence of life for roughly 2 billion years ETI has had oodles of time to do something about us. We’re still here suggesting that no ETI within hundreds of lightyears feels threatened by us. Or there is no ETI within hundreds of lightyears.
Our broadcasts have spread to a miniscule portion of the galaxy. Some small fraction of a percent. Dark Forrest could be true, we just may not be noticed for another few million years.
Also, a lot of them already overlap on their own. "Self-Destruction," "Rare Intelligence," and "Interstellar Travel is Impossible" are really just restating different layers of "The Great Filter." "We're the First" and "We're Alone" are just describing a universe where the early filters are extremely strong. All the ideas describing alien behavior can all be true across many individual cultures at the same time.
Some solutions may be that there's an either/or situation between different solutions. Perhaps there's an either/or situation between self-destruction or finding the "better way". Perhaps there's an either/or situation between whether interstellar travel is possible or life creating or evolving into post-biological beings: Life putting some version of themselves onto computers that can be accelerated more quickly, or more speculatively, turning into an energy being that could travel in something like holoships from Red Dwarf.
Yeah, it's definitely a combination. Although I think "rare intelligence" and possibly "life is rare" are the most likely top reasons why we see/hear nothing. Even if intelligent life is rare, it's certainly plausible to still have dozens of civilizations at any given time in a galaxy that are so far from each other that catching a glimpse or a signal is extremely difficult if not impossible. The galaxy is BIG.
People always hate on me for really liking the Dark Forest hypothesis but it's like.... In a practically infinite universe it probably is true to an extent, along with a ton of other hypotheses. Thing is it's not really about picking the flavor you fancy because it's the coolest, a ton of them likely do overlap.
my only disappointment is that you didn't include Isaac Arthur, President of the National Space Society, considering he has an entire youtube series covering fermi paradox solutions.
You should check out P E Rowe. He has a year of weekly sci fi short audiobooks based on Isaac Arthur's topics. As talented as Asimov, Heinlein, or Le Guin, imho.
Someone else asked the same question in the comments here and Fraser answered that he has had many collaborations with Isaac Arthur in the past and he said he wanted to add additional voices to the conversation.
I know they’ve colaborated before, maybe it just didn’t work this time or maybe he wanted to switch it up a little IDK. Either way Isaac is a gentleman and isn’t exactly hurting for exposure right now.
With regard to Dakotah Tyler's comments on the simulation hypothesis, he had two criticisms: 1. to simulate every atom in the universe, would require a computer larger than the universe. 2. It makes no sense to simulate an entire universe, and then only put one planet of life in it. But what if these two ideas are complimentary... what if to get around 1, they only simulate the parts of the universe at the detail and scale they need for the people on the single planet to have a compelling view of the rest of the universe, without simulating all the atoms of every star out there. In fact, that's how many modern computer games work, simulating finer grained details only as you get close enough for those details to become relevant to the view (Or whenever you zoom in on them with a telescope etc). In that case, the simulation of only one world with conscious observers, might help them to solve the issue with the information theory and computational power issues involved. I give it a C+. Only a little higher, but still.
Yes, Dakota doesn't really understand how computer programmers think, and therefore how computer programs work. They get optimised as much as possible to use as little resources as possible, it would be ridiculous to simulate "every atom in the universe"
@@sssfulton yeah, when you think about the amount of photons we get from distant galaxies, its literally just a handful of photons per hour that get collected over days to accumulate a visual picture, this shows how little processing it could take to simulate distant galaxies / universe
And whats to say they would not have developed intelligence? Birds are dinosaurs, despite their tiny brains, eg crows are surprisingly intelligent and not too far from the apes we evolved from.
The late paleontologist Dr. Stephen Jay Gould discussed this in one of his books. (I think it was “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”.) He believed that life was very common in the universe but intelligent life was extremely rare. He argued that if, for example, the asteroid that wiped out the non avian dinosaurs had missed the Earth that intelligent life might have never arisen. He mentioned that during the age of the dinosaurs that there was no trend towards increasing intelligence at all. He said that even allegedly intelligent dinosaurs like velociraptors weren’t as smart as modern-day corvids like crows and ravens. And of course, with dinosaurs out of the way that let mammals, including us, to flourish.
@@bbartky I would imagine that the asteroid was just the thing that wiped out the dinosaurs *first.* Life is, first of all, adaptable -- but only if allowed enough time. The dinosaurs were very well-adapted to their environment, but it changed faster than most of them could adapt to keep up with. And sooner or later, some kind of sudden change is inevitable -- very few things in the universe are constant. If it wasn't the asteroid it would've been something else. Mind you, that kind of change to Earth's history would probably render all subsequent life unrecognizable by the time you reach the modern day. Any intelligent life might not resemble humans at all.
@@vertigo2893It's not the intelligent life only, it's the intelligent civilisation. Orcas are very intelligent but they don't build computers or planes or perform surgeries.
Nice. I had waited to listen to this until i had a nice drive and it was well worth it. Though, I was wondering about the 420 hypothesis where it is the scenario that they show in movies when someone gets "altered" mentally and wonders if our solar system isnt just an atom in a fingernail of a larger being 😅
Agreed this is the most compelling to me. I dont think there is a practical way to go faster than light. I think the self replicating robots angle is just a cop out and in reality isnt possible, I think the distance is too far for even that to practically function. The universe is full of life its just a bunch of islands so far way from each other and the sea between is to treacherous for anything to survive the journey,.
But what is the bottleneck that prevents the universe from having a higher density of civilizations? Would you expect other nearby planets with an environmental suited for life, but having no life? Planets with actual simple life forms? With complex animals?
yeah but as Moiya points out, at that point you're just arguing Plato. Like sure, I can walk through my hometown in a dream, with huge holes in logic everywhere, and as long as I'm not lucid dreaming my brain just goes with it. You can't test for something you're not conscious of. However, I think this theory breaks down because it requires 100% perfection. You can lucid dream. Not only can you lucid dream, you can start lucid dreaming IN a non-lucid dream, AND this is an actual, teachable skill. If our simulated universe requires this to be the dream state for our higher conscious minds to be in, then it should have the same problems dreams have. And if you can learn to become, say, 'super-lucid' this by definition should make you aware of the simulation, the same way lucid dreaming automatically makes you aware that you're dreaming. But not only has this never been observed, among spiritualists and similar who claim to be able to reach a higher consciousness, they've never recognized anything even resembling a simulation. That immediately fails the sniff test for me.
@@z-beeblebroxOur perception of the world around us is largely reconstructive. Our map of the cosmos is even more reconstructive. Whenever we, as an example, detect signs of alien transmission our first assumption is that the highly sensitive and temperamental equipment we are using must be at fault.
@@DigitalDustChan None of that is what the OP is trying to argue for. But IMO - and this goes both ways - any signal that's not strong enough that we know with certainty it's from an intelligent civilization, isn't worth detecting, period. It's problematic enough dealing with decades-long gaps between replies, if there's error involved as well we'd be better off not realizing it's for real in the first place.
@@z-beeblebrox this would not be Plato, this would be you being an NPC and shouting all day "This is a good day for fishing" while bumping into trees and changing direction randomly ... except you don't perceive that because you don't have code for it. Talking about simulations is meaningless: if it is a simulation anything goes. Maybe even this conversation is scripted, and the player characters will get clues to complete quests from this thread.
I remember reading a story about a hiker who got lost in Japan. This kind of baffled me, because surely if you walk in a straight line in Japan for a few kilometres you're bound to bump into a farm, city, railway, highway... I mean, it's pretty densely populated. But you can't see a city 25km away if you're in the woods. Space may well be the same, but we haven't really got the ability to see all that far. In 100+ years when we've surveyed the whole galaxy with future super telescopes and haven't found anything, then it gets interesting.
@@brick6347but he was right about the inland of Japan only being scarcely populated. You shouldn't have started your otherwise perfectly good explanation with some rather dumb observation. You don't have to be autistic to know how the population in Japan is concentrated along the shoreline. Not being American definitely helps too😂
12:40 You don't have to simulate a whole universe - you just simulate the sense perceptions of the simulated minds ostensively observing that universe and that live within it, for example. That approach would be far more focused and can be as »low-resolution« as the simulated senses of the entities you're interested in simulating to begin with.
Time and distance is the biggest filter: Odds are against any peoples being at level of sophistication that they can find and begin communication with another peoples of the same mindset. There might be someone thinking almost the same as we do but they are three galaxies away and the odds of us finding each other are next to zero.
YES! I just wrote something similar, that distance, both of space and of time would seem to DOMINATE any discussion of the Fermi Paradox. Any notion we have of a single 'society' or a single 'culture' would seem to collapse when considering a species that might split to live on two different worlds, perhaps even in the same stellar system. The delays in communication, the challenges in maintaining ANY sort of sustainable and directed purpose on geological time, it seems maybe it's just too much to expect of complex, dynamic living things. And that's if Abiogenesis itself has even a shot of occurring, which based on what little I know, seems an almost impossible expectation. Even the simplest form of life seems like a complex factory of components that function together in harmony and order, but completely without a conductor, an overseer or anything like that. Just how likely or unlikely is Abiogenesis to occur on a suitable location in the cosmos, be that a moon, planet, wherever. It's a frustrating question because our example of one only tells us the possibility is somewhere between 0 and 1, but it could be arbitrarily-close to 0 so that no matter how large the Universe, no matter how many liquid water worlds orbiting in the habitable zone of long-lived red dwarf stars, maybe Abiogenesis itself has only EVER happened once, here on Earth. Man, I hope that's not true. We must explore the oceans of our solar system's moons ....
My problem with many of these is that they have to account for ALL life. Any scenario where a species has to choose an option (go ethereal, stay home, don't spend extravagant energy, ...) may apply to SOME species, but not ALL. For me any solution has to be caused by nature/physics or there will be exceptions that we might detect. Anything else goes straight in the D-bucket for me. The most plausable to me is a combination of rarity and not having looked wide enough - in other words, they exist, but are far and few between and we just need to keep looking (possibly for millennia to come).
Personally, I think a combination of the following factors makes the most sense: 1. Vast Distances(I feel like no matter how educated you are, it's really easy to handwaive the absolutely massive distances between planets, star systems, galaxies, and so forth) 2. Narrow scope of the places and methods we've looked for intelligent life(We really are just shining a laser pointer into the corner of a dark forest and assuming no life exists because the light didn't land squarely on Sasquatch's forehead) 3. Narrow definition of what we would consider "intelligence" (i.e. assuming intelligence = technological expansion across space at ever increasing power demands) 4. Timing (For instance, there could have been alien species relatively close to or greater than human intelligence, but say, lived 100 million years ago and went extinct after 100 thousand years) 5. Great Filters (I am more inclined to believe most of the filters are behind us, but some like the conditions needed to grow technologically are specific enough that there are probably tons of planets with life thats somewhere between single celled bacteria and the dinosaurs, but almost none that got to the "mining the planet for ancient stores of fossil fuels if they even have that equivalent to power their technology" stage) 6. We're the First/There are no advanced civilizations(tied in with 1 and 2 - It could just be that there hasn't been any other advanced intelligent life that developed in the relatively small amount of space we've looked at so far. Doesn't mean there isn't 100 star faring civilizations in Andromeda, but just that there aren't any Galactic Empires nearby) In a nutshell, it's a lack of scope combined with just the vast distances/timescales and what we consider intelligence being heavily dependent on our own evolution that answers the Fermi Paradox. I don't think there are any invisible civilizations "hiding the truth" from us, but instead that life is possibly prolific, and space is just like, really, really big on timescales that don't mesh well with our current standards.
I miss the weekly space hangout, but thank you for helping me find Moiya again! And thanks for promoting new and amazing talent. Found Dakotah a while back thanks to you as well. Amazing everyone! Thanks!
I think you guys got it completely wrong with the simulation. Like, first, why do you assume every atom in the universe would have to be simulated? Do you now how video games/ virtual environments are rendered? Computer only renders in detail the thing we are interacting with, everything else kinda doesnt exist. Sounds quite quantum, doesnt it? :D Also, the if the base universe is much larger, complex then our universe, as real as it seems, could be their equivalent of Minecraft. Does Steve in Mincraft say it would be impossible to have a computer simulate all that Minecraft wolrd because, according to his Minecraft physics, it would take a computer bigger than the entire Minecraft universe?
I brought that up. The simulation doesn't tell us anything about base reality. The Sims think they're living in reality, but it's nothing like the real world.
@@frasercain but, you could optimize it well enough that it could skip simple steps to get the end result pretty well, and you could probably see those skips if you developed the science enough. just like how computers can make circles out of triangles.
you have to think bigger - out of the box. like, what if the real universe is 1 brazillian times larger than our sim, and there is no speed of light limit limit, and it's 20-dimensions, and everyone gets a pony, and there is no 2nd law of thermodynamics, and math is way easier. not a single rule or observation or technique or limit we see can be assumed to apply in the the outer reality. that's where the argument fails for me not that it's unbelievable or impossible - but it's unfalsifiable. so might as well get on with the other ideas unless 'they' give us a hint.
yea but still the simulation hypothesis doesn’t tell anyone anything. Like maybe it’s a simulation in a simulation in a simulation but so what none of that gets you anywhere.
I think the biggest answer is intelligent civilizations rise and fall by either killing themselves off or suffering some calamity beyond their control like and asteroid, gamma ray burst or even volcanos that cause extiction. Advanced civilizations rarely coexist and if so, distance is the problem
If we live in a simulation, our ENTIRE experience of the entire universe is still INSIDE the simulation and we’d have zero idea of the real size and power abilities of entities outside this simulation.
@@IARRCSim Yikes, that would imply that none of our transactions, social or otherwise, were real. We would merely be pawns with the sole purpose of angering the bad gods.
would it have killed you to post the chart that you have at the end. This is probably the 2nd or 3rd time I have listened to this one. I don't think you would lose that many viewers. In case you haven't figured it out, this was a great podcast.
42:32 - I really have to disagree. “Life forms really early” is not some universal fact, it’s just what we observed in our particular case. After all, we only have a sample size of one. Until we see evidence of life forming equally early elsewhere in the universe, it’s much more correct to say “OUR life formed really early”, and to use that to *support* the “we’re first” argument, rather than to refute it.
In essence, it boils down to being unable to compare just one sample. The earliness or not of our life is irrelevant, since some other life might've taken longer. If we rank all known life-forms and first is the one with a rank one, then we are the first since we only know one. I think it's a red herring to point to our lateness or earliness. On the other hand, having seen our recent rapid technological advancements, if we assume an earlier-than-us alien life, it must be communicating or at least producing waste heat - not being to observe that, in my opinion, is the real argument for us being first.
I agree. Also, as far as we know, life only started once here. If we had seen left- and right handed DNA or anything else that could point to multiple origins of live, then it would be a much stronger argument.
I personally think the Fishbowl hypothesis is most accurate. Life is common; even multi-cellular life is common. Even intelligence is not all that rare. Yet, civilization with technology and access to the cosmos is extremely rare. Most life will evolve with water inside an ice bound planet or moon. And even if intelligence happens and creates a form of civilization, the chances to discover space faring tech is so extremely improbable. It took humans 2 million years to get to this early point of space travel.
A friend had a sci fi short story idea: life evolves on an ocean planet with an ice layer. They never evolve eyes but just advanced sonar. They drill through the ice, look at a star filled universe, but hear nothing think the ice is the edge of their universe and go back under water
@@thatfuzzypotato1877 Great idea, but i think they could still detect stuff from the outside, like a meteorite hitting the ice from above, some sort of atmosphere and pressure on the outside, maybe with some winds and the sound of the wind
It took less than 100 years to go from flight to escape of our solar system though. Seems like technological advance is on an exponential curve so might not be so far off to making self replicating probes.
I'm a video game programmer. The behavior of photons (wave to particle on interaction) is the same way we optimize physics in games. Gravity can also be explained by processing speed. each tick of time is the length of time needed to run the simulation in that given area. The more calculations needed, the slower time moves. So the more matter in an area, the more calculations needed per tick. It would work this way if each Plank Length is a processor of fixed processing speed. As far as simulations being visibly different is incorrect, that's not what we do as game developers. We find a simulation that gives the same results with lower resolution. A fractal calculation will give as much detail as you can observe and all that accuracy will be correct. WE CAN MAKE THIS NOW., but In a much simpler way. Looking at the universe from the perspective of high accuracy optimized simulation, the simulation theory is a B or an A.
@@SuperYtc1 Then that begs the question: What is this "base reality" you're proposing? Sounds to me like an unfalsifiable concept, and therefore lacking current scientific validity. It's just as easy to say that the universe is by its very nature iteratively simulated in both past and future directions, infinitely.
"each Plank Length is a processor" That doesn't make any sense, sorry. Like plank lenght is a 1D concept. We live in a 4D relativistic spacetime continuum here. :) And what exactly you mean by "processor"? Do you mean Von Neumann architecture CPU? Or what? :)
"more matter in an area, the more calculations needed per tick" - What if you have the same number of particles but with different mass? For exmaple the same number of protons vs neutrons. These two systems would have a different mass (and therefore different time dilation) but the same computational requirements. Doesn't work. I think this might be a case of "every problem looks like a nail" kind of bias.
Regarding the game theory argument you made on the Dark Forest Hypothesis, it is only valid for a game with only one interaction. When you have a game with multiple interactions, strategies with good behaviour outperform detrimental ones.
Actually all it takes is for a small percentage of hostile aliens to completely wipe out all the benevolent ones and if benevolent ones happen to witness this, they will cease to be benevolent.
@@justfellover Yeah, but if you have a first contact, it should be natural to assume there will be a second, especially if the contact is relatively close enough that you can have any sort of dialogue(even if it takes 100k years to get a reply). Its one thing to assume you are alone in the universe. Assuming you are alone in the universe... except for that one other group of intelligent people 100 thousand light years away is much less believable.
@@GodWorksOut True, but in that case you'd run into two scenarios: 1. There is only a few civilizations out there and if you are the top dog civilization, you'd likely be able to expand pretty openly while culling weaker civilizations, with your presence being pretty easy to be detect as there wouldn't be anyone to stop you and enough of a technological gap that you could detect and destroy any potential future rivals 2. There are tons of civilizations out there, enough that a single top dog is hard to determine, in which case the fairly constant destruction of other civilizations would be fairly easy to detect Even if you can't see the other hunters in a dark forest, if it's violent and dangerous enough, there should be carcasses and the sounds of animals being predated.
@@GiggaGMikeE Or regardless of how many, any intelligent species that would have the capability to make themselves known runs the logic and comes to the conclusion to stay quiet, so meetings between civilizations are rare. Doesn't matter how "top dog" you are when anyone can lob a bunch of rocks in your direction at 95% c.
I think the true answer is a combo of a lot of these. I think that the most potent options is the idea that we are one of the firsts and expansionist civilizations kill themselves, and non expansionist civilizations don't feel the need or find is selfish to take the whole universe to themselves.
Would we be able to detect life on Earth if we were like 20 lightyears or more away from Earth with our contemporary state of the art technology? I highly doubt it. And that's your answer. Our technology simply isn't sufficient enough to detect alien life in even our local part of the galaxy. So what paradox?
One assumption with the Fermi Paradox is that "more advanced" means "much bigger, more impressive and louder". We're pretty close to looking for biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres, we'd be able too see if neighboring intelligences were building dyson spheres and if Von Neuhman probes were mining the moon. Was this asumption accurate? Hard to tell, we don't even know what technology on Earth will look like in thirty years. Note that they DO adress that in the video.
The best objection to the "simulation hypothesis" was not the ones they settled on but one they glossed over - it's not a hypothesis at all because it's not falsifiable. I'm 100% with Moiya on the simulation hypothesis.
It's not falsifiable YET. It may never be falsifiable, but we can't say that for sure right now. String Theory, as far as I know, isn't falsifiable yet either, but we sure put a lot of our energy into exploring the concept and its offshoots in recent decades.
I'm only 10 minutes into this but I already feel like you should do this format again but with Isaac Arthur as a guest. That guy has a lot of really clear and in-depth thoughts about this subject matter that might make a video like this very informative to a lot of people.
@@frasercain I know you have, it's just that I thought this concept would be right up his alley. Conversely, I like your new guests but this topic doesn't seem to be one that they have thought an awful lot about. They make some rookie mistakes in their thinking, such as not acknowledging that getting your hands on as much energy as you can is an instrumental goal and that you don't have to explain why _some_ species wouldn't do x and y but why not a single species out there would do x or y.
Yes, he has some really convincing points and counterpoints on some of these (like the "its very improbable, that every single individual adheres to the prime directive"-point Fraser made), that would have made some of the arguments in this video much more easy and helpful.
just because The Dark Forest is a possibility, we should take it seriously (we need to advance.., but we won't, if we destroy ourselves before.., we need to get our act together, than focus fully on advancement.. ofc reasonable, not fanatically)
My favourite solution is the evidence horizon. So civilisation spreads across the galaxy like ripples in a pond, falling apart afterwards because of natural processes and the problems of maintaining that civilisation, like distance and time. So in short, we’re either existing before the first wave, or we missed the last wave and we’re surrounded by ruins and the dead, slowly falling apart all evidence disappearing. Also, I think the great filter is that little girl!
A simulation of the universe doesn't require a computer with the power of the universe, like Dakotah says. You don't need to simulate every atom. Only things that are observed need a supply of data, which, compared with the size of the universe, is miniscule. Open world video games don't load the entire map into memory the entire time, just what is active on and around what's on the screen. This actually ties in fairly neatly with quantum mechanics and measurement and wave functions. One could take it a step further and apply the holographic principle to make the data requirement much smaller/compressed, since the perceived three-dimensionality of space is contained in only two dimensions. I'm not convinced regarding the simulation hypothesis, but it is certainly a compelling idea. I'd put it in A tier.
Even if you are observing just a part of the universe you still need to simulate down to every elementary particle, and also keep backward consistency of event causality all the way back to the Big Bang. And videogames - which are discretized physical simulations - aren't fully analogous to real physics. Far from it. Especially if you go anywhere beyond basic newtonian mechanics.. For example both quantum mechanics and general relativity are notoriously hard to simulate on Von-neuman computers.
I think we are alone. Multicellular life is incredibly hard and intelligent life even more so. As evidenced right here at home. As an aside, should it turn out we are alone, I think we should just construct a universe full of life where FTL travel is possible , leave the AIs in charge, and go live in there.
Considering the vastness of space, the diversity of life just on this one planet, I can't imaging any solution that involves everyone responding to the same problems in the same way. Humans don't even do that within our own species. There's just far too many unimaginable ways to be.
But there is one 'right way' to respond when you have infinite resources and no natural predators, and life always takes that route. Because if one lifeform doesn't naturally multiply to fill a niche fully, then one that does will take that place for them. On Earth there is limited space, which limits this, but there is no real limit in outer space. The first species to spread exponentially will out compete any that does not.
@@cortster12 If they're aiming for a very-long-term survival, like sometime in the black hole era, then exponential growth might waste resources prematurely. No, there's not a one right way.
@krumuvecis Exponential survival isn't feasible, and also not something an entire species can decide at once. If 99% slow down their expansion, but 1% do not, then that 1% will become the 99%.
@@cortster12 True, but again, with the vastness of that space, it'd just as possible to assume that what you described is happening 1 billion light years away from us, and only started a million years ago. Expecting to see evidence of it now is like expecting to see a gorilla in your broom closet in the next five minutes to prove that they ever existed at all.
@@cortster12 Unless that 1% encounters a Great Filter that only affects those who try to expand too greatly and get wiped out/wipe themselves out. Humans needed curiosity and desires for more to branch out and evolve technologically, but you can argue that if caution and apprehension were also traits we possessed it'd be very easy for us to have gone extinct as well. And again, that all assumes that we'll eventually just "figure out" long term expansion/living in space/colonizing other planets in the long term. It's possible that it's just not feasible in a way that only becomes clear when you progress a bit further than we are now.
Life is rare. Intelligence very, very rare. Try: Life: 1 per galaxy, Intelligence: 1per galactic cluster. If the odds are anything like this we should not expect to see or hear from anyone ever. On the other hand, we have vast amounts of useless inaccessible real estate at our disposal.
Sure, and we don't have to be THE first in the entire universe, just in the area we can meaningfully observe. I think that would be the laniakea supercluster at most, so that still leaves plenty of room to spare for other civilisations that might be out there, just not close enough for us to see.
There's just too many filters. Right chemistry Stable temperate atmosphere Liquids Abiogenisis Multicellular Complex Then I think there's something about the sequence of our evolutionary tree. Something about spacial awareness in primates when swinging in the trees and then social brain and language. And then even if another species gets there, they're going to need an atmosphere that supports combustion in order to do metallurgy.
@@_nebulousthoughts so many filters. We haven’t even defined them all. Australia was still in the Stone Age when Europeans showed up. Why? Economists speculate it’s because there weren’t any long-legged animals to act as beasts of burden for commerce, and thus very slow development. Without Jupiter acting as our comet-sink, we’d have been destroyed many times over. Etc, etc, ad nauseam. We’re unbelievably lucky.
1:43:45 "Who knows if that's something we can actually do." Physicists. Physicists know that we can't use quantum entanglement to transmit information.
I was surprised that the panel dismissed Fraser's zoo/simulation hypothesis. One of the huge advantages of that type of hypothesis is that it completely bypasses the Copernican principle/mediocrity principle, which is arguably the main reason that the Fermi paradox is a paradox to begin with. Where is everybody? if life is so mediocre and common, as it should be based on the sheer numbers, where is everybody? answer: they are common in the universe but we are being hidden from them and nobody is bothering to look for us just like nobody on earth is bothering to find an invisible grain of sand located somewhere on one of the beaches of the earth. Also, the simulation hypothesis doesn't require anything like a simulation of the entire universe, as others have pointed out.
It would require simulating practically all observable universe since the big bang. Otherwise how would you ensure that every observer has the same consistent view of the causal history?
So there needs to be two tiers on the zoo hypothesis: a true zoo, where we are in a pen and they control our environment, and the much more realistic that we are being observed by an expedition Jane Goodall style... Nevermind, this was addressed with the prime directive immidiatly after, lol. Simulation theory: you don't need to simulate the entire universe, you only have to simulate what we can interact with. So... Back to flat earth's firmament: the only thing simulated is the local world, the rest is only simulated for being visible by our sensors. Great filters: Another way to analogize great filters is the human factors safety swiss cheese model. Self destruction: "there's no such thing as an unarmed starship" every technology has a dual use of both peaceful and destructive uses. The ability to broadcast out to other civilizations and beyond comes with the same ability to destroy themselves. We are first: only if you ignore the UFO phenomenon. We are alone: absolutely not, the probability is just too astronomical. E might be the first, but not the only, ever. We can't see them: this could help explain some of the UFO phenomenon as well. "...does Europa still Europa?" ROFL!!!!! Post biological lie: "it's just a phase man".... So hippie. Lol. But I like this idea too, a civilization went silicon based. Hibernation: Basically hyper-isolationist. You'd have to worry about grabby aliens raiding your sleeping civilization. Our tech isn't good enough: absolutely! The problem with the fermi paradox in the first place: sample bias. We have only sampled an extremely small amount if the galaxy/universe. Looking in the wrong place: There is an entire area we can't even see past the other side of the milky way galaxy because if all the 'stuff' in the way. So we have a huge astronomical blind spot in our cosmic back yard. Plus dark forest theory would say "stay away from this big beacon of light" They are already here: (conspiracy theory) I hate how most scientists, astronomers, and thinkers dismiss this explanation so quickly. Anecdotal evidence is still evidence, using our most basic sensors available "our eyes" as one of them said earlier. So the most glaring example that blows all the other theories out of the water, is dismissed quicker than the moderator can get it out of his mouth. "Classified higher than nuclear weapons" (the only reason we know about nuclear technology is because we had to use it. If we didn't use it, it would probably still be a secret. I would be surprised if, in a M.A.D. scenario, that using alien tech isn't one of the options the president has in the nuclear football.
Isn't it conceivable that complex intelligent life and technological civilizations are possible in the Universe, but extremely, extremely unlikely? And we happen to be it, the only winning lottery ticket in the galaxy or the Universe?
Yea sounds like 49:00 or maybe 25:53, 44:20. Plausible I think because if there IS a winning ticket, the anthropic principle says we *must* be the ones holding it.
@@LG-km8fw The next closest galaxy - Andromeda - is 2.5 million lightyears away. If there's an average of one intelligent civilization per galaxy (which is WAY higher than OP is estimating here), and assuming the one in Andromeda messages us the moment they know we exist, and assuming the moment we started broadcasting into space we sent a perfect signal out towards them, then we won't know our neighbor civilization exists for another 5 million years. And we won't have the technology to see their biosignature for at least another hundred, but it won't matter because the light from their biosignature won't reach us for 2 to 2.5 million years, depending on how old they are.
Could be, could be. Unless we find another life, we can't really judge the rarity. Currently, as far as we know, we're the only ones in the whole existence
I have had decades to think about the Fermi paradox. 49:we are alone. Uniformity of physics in the background of space says if we find life on the earth, life should have regenerated for billions of years before the oxygenation event. We find life began as a singularity. The Miller Urey experiment and tunneling chemistry in the cold of space show that amino acids are found in asteroids and moons. We dont have a theory or definition of life that predicts life. We find life by comparison. Even if it's panspermia you only push the origin back in time. That's why life is not cause and effect of uniform physics. Life has not been detectable in space as complex proteins for 10.2 billion years. Life on earth is a paradox. You can't seed the earth without complex proteins in Kuiper belt objects. Life is a thin layer on the surface of earth. Levinthal paradox of proteins. The human body 37,000 billion cells, 37.5 trillion symbiotes, Andromeda is only a trillion stars, 80 billion neurons, about as many as the clouds of Milky Way stars, our dna can stretch twice across the solar system, dendrites are 1,000 to 10,000 trillion, Our own thoughts may occur because of Feynman paths and Penrose microtubules. If life is cause effect there would be swarms of Boltzman brain comets. You are a singularity from every generation 37 trillion cells accurately reproduced from one cell. Physics does not predict free will from a swarm of particles. By the same logic life doesn't begin from inert metallicity. It is as though the universe does not have the degrees of freedom. See Y Chromosome Bottleneck at the dawn of civilization, Cambrian Explosion of Life, Origins Revisited by Richard Leakey Jr. Just the 1s2 tip of discovery
I'm with Fraser on the "We're Alone" being in S-tier. No indication that the formation of life is an easy step that just "must happen" on all the other planets that have the right ingredients. That seems like a logical fallacy where people see a large number of potential planets out in the universe and since they can't comprehend that number, assume that somewhere one of those has to be life bearing, when the step to generate life could be 1 over 1000 times that number for all we know. Non-life -> life transition is still too poorly understood to make a claim that it surely happens across other planets.
@@fep_ptcp883 It felt to me like Fraser was arguing a different point. He seemed to argue "does this explain the Fermi Paradox?" whereas the guests seemed to be ranking based off of perceived/logical likelihood. "We're Alone" absolutely explains everything, but still seems to me to be laughably inadequate as a logical solution unless several other factors are also involved (like Great Filters, Interstellar is impossible, etc.)
The universe abhors one-offs. If it happened here, it happened somewhere else as well. I refuse to subscribe to the 'We are alone' explanation, as it is more improbable that we are alone. Maybe a better explanation is that we are alone in this part of the galaxy, or we are the only ones in this galaxy, but if every galaxy had only one civilization, there would be at least two trillion advanced civilizations in the observable universe. Yet, we are just too far apart to ever communicate or detect one another.@@fellknight
@@fep_ptcp883 You don't have to imagine that. For all intents and purposes that is literally the case. The only thing sad about it is assuming the worst in everyone past, present and future because of shitty people around you now.
@@fellknight I noticed that too, and it was most pronounced to the "We're Alone" solution segment, to the point where I felt like they should have called it something else when I assumed they were all arguing for or against it's likelihood of being true. I was absolutely shocked by Fraser giving it an S rank in that case, but it is basically the best answer for specifically answering the Fermi Paradox itself.
If this zoo hypothesis should work it must mean there actually are a bunch of intelligent aliens and all of them are both in agreement and 100% disciplined, over long time? What are the chances? Are they not even slightly similar to us, where some guy jump in to the bear pit?
And, you know, there's an evolutionary pressure to have at least SOME members of a species being the kind to jump into bear pits. Yeah, most of those die but the ones who don't find new ecological niches or resources. So you have to have different species who can all agree despite being more diverse than what you see on earth. More different than a moss and bananas. Who all agree. AND you need ALL those species to have internal consensus? Over millions of years?
@@TheStephaneAdam - besides, who will be the crew on these spaceships? Of course, exactly as on ships etc here on earth, ordinary people doing impulsive things when they have an opportunity, there would be someone on earth with a camera when one of these guys eventually can stretch their legs on earth do something undisciplined
@@frasercain couldn't that also mean that when Kirk goes and interacts with primitive planets, when those people go tell others of their kind about it, they just get dismissed as crazy ufo folks... Maybe not all the advanced beings coming down from the heavens crap that is all throughout our ancient history and mythology and religions and just plain old people even today saying they saw weird sky crap weren't lying, or at least not all of them. Boom! So there are beings "breaking their prime directives" all over our history but it's all explained away as myth/religion/crackpot conspiracy theories. Ever consider that?
I think it'll turn out to be one of two things. The Dark Forest idea is plausible. Assuming there have been advanced civilizations out there, there has had to be at least one case of one civ wiping out another one. This would mandate that all of the remaining civs assume a Dark Forest scenario approach. But my first choice for explanation is that we just don't know what to look for. Everyone says we've been looking and haven't detected anything. We've detected lots of things in the universe. We might not understand what we're truly seeing. Some animals don't realize they are looking at themselves when they look in a mirror. They lack the capability to grasp what a reflection is, or maybe they don't have any sense of self. Maybe we humans are also lacking a key element that is needed to recognize extraterrestrial life when we detect it.
Fraser on the great filter: I don't want to think that we are doomed to self-destruction, so I give it A tier. Fraser on self-destruction: This is what Carl Sagan worried about. Preach. S tier. Huh?
There is a fairly obvious most-likely answer to the Fermi Paradox. First of all, intelligent life is either very rare or astronomically rare. In combination with that, because aliens are bound by the same laws of physics that we are, it is exceptionally hard for them to A, travel interstellar, B, see that our planet has evolved to industrialization (only 200 light years distance observable from their telescopes), C, communicate with us because, again, they would likely need to be within 200 light years to even guess that we might have radio or similar communication, and how does an advanced civilization communicate over 1000 or 1 million light years?, D, an element of the Prime Directive where, because it takes so much work and effort for them to communicate with us, they are far more interested, even ethically, in observing us rather than intervening.
Any radio signals we make would be soon lost in the vastness, just like hiker calling out in a dark forest. The distances make the idea of interstellar war/trade/settlement ludicrous. I think if we invent space-habitats and bejewel the solar system with them we'll do just nicely. Or maybe, just maybe, live within our means on planet Earth.
The answer to the Fermi Paradox is so simple (as per Occam's Razor): space is so much bigger than we can comprehend, if there are any others out there, it’s unlikely we’d ever see them. Using the needle in the haystack apology, the haystack is so unimaginably big, and the needle so small, even if the aliens were super advanced, the time it would take to statistically find one would probably be thousands or millions of years
But you havent explained why the needle is so small. There are trillions of earth-like planets within our observable universe, why would only one of them produce intelligent life?
@@vertigo2893 because of the tens of thousands of stars we’ve surveyed using Kepler, tess and others - we’re yet to find an Earth analogue. Our proverbial needle is so small, simply because space is so big and so vast. And that’s without even factoring in the time lost to the limit of light speed
@@BlinkRazor But we have found earth like planets, like LHS475b. Its obviously incredibly hard with our current tech to see planets at trillions of kilometer, heck, we are not even sure yet how many planets there are in our own solar system! That doesnt mean we dont know that there must be billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone and literally quintillions in the observable universe. And it doesnt mean we shouldnt be able to detect signals from them if any of them have advanced civilizations. Yet so far none of them seem to transmit any intelligent EM radiation and none of them seem to have launched von neumann probes. That requires a better explanation than "small needle".
Advanced civilisation would expand exponentially in all directions to maximize its chances of survival. For example at only 0.1c you could colonize an entire galaxy within a million years. So for example if such civlisation existed 1 billion years ago, lets say 500 million light years away, then we should already be able to see them. Because a huge area in our sky would have infrared light from Dyson spheres and show other technosignatures..
@@kyjo72682 Ok, but if that advanced civilization developed a billion light years from us and has only been colonizing for say, the last 100,000 years? What evidence would we see right now? It seems alot of the Fermi Paradox solutions, especially the more pessamistic ones play fast and loose with just how vast the universe is and how little of it we've actually seen. They acknowledge that the universe is billions of years old and expanding faster than the speed of light, but then act shocked that we haven't found proof in the last 100 or so years we've been looking, and that our ability to "look" in general is basically the equivalent to sticking your nose out a window in New Jersey right now to see if you can smell(and determine the flavor of) a pie baked in Zimbabwae 3000 years ago.
Wow, you guys pondered this answer a while and this reply only allows me so much text. Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed all the philosophical possibilities of your podcast very much. I often tell my son that, "I don't know" is not only a sufficient term but one that more folks should use. Although you should not allow that answer to keep you from looking for solutions, testing your theories and humbly exchanging thoughts and facts. I believe that curious imagination is the key to the intellect that will propel mankind forward. That said, I simply and humbly believe that the sample size of where we are looking, the amount of time we've been actively searching, the immense size and vastness of our visual universe and how far away any species has to travel to say "hi" combined with the tools necessary for either side to look or travel out to do so and the problems either would have finding and conservatively using the energy needed to do something as insignificant as "reaching out to touch someone" and hoping it won't turn out to blow up in either of our faces by destroying each other should we meet, to have more negative possibilities than positive for beings obviously more advanced than we. Time and distance simply doesn't work in our favor biologically. After observing our species in my limited time here, I wouldn't want to meet the angry little humans that monetarily have base everything on a need to be in control of everything. The universe is very dangerous and out of control to say the least and we, as aliens, are already more advanced than humans; so we need to meet them for what good reason? But most of all, relatively speaking, should you compare the vastness of space to the vastness of say, our oceans, we know factually that the ocean is full of life, but if you drop a bucket on a string into the water and reel it up, you will NEVER come up with a fish, but I'm sure they are there. You need more time, a bigger bucket or a very long spool of fishing line and very convincing bait to get some fish. Then hope the game is catch and release or the cunning little humans that lured us in are going to want to eat us to replace that energy they used trying to catch fish all day, mount us on the wall for posterity or want to keep us as pets in a tank. Not much good can come of it statistically if you were looking at it from the point of view of the little green guys. Things being equal and usually what they seem, the sample size is just not big enough and we haven't been fishing all that long. Fire is hot, ice is cold, space and time are vast and like Billy Bob Thornton said in Armagedon "...the U.S. budget allows us to observe about 1% the sky and beggin your pardon Mr. President, but it's a big ass sky." We already can prove that microscopic life and /or the building blocks of life resides on asteroids and breaks our atmosphere often. There is most certainly life out there, the math allows for craploads of it, both intelligent and in our case sometimes not so intelligent. Our lives are EXTREMELY short and it's likely our time will have passed to enjoy the moment we run across each other. But I do believe, it is bound to happen, may already have or will one day soon at a theater near you or maybe, just maybe we were not meant to know and "I don't know" will have to sufffice until the book has been read, the knowledge is bequeathed and the math allows us the proper tools or vice versa. I can only keep doing the math I understand and hope I'm here when the mothership arrives. Or departs.
Dont know if I missed it, but is giving the Ferme Paradox a grade yet not taking the Drake equation into consideration? "If we are all alone out there, sure seems like huge waste of space. Alright, alright. Universe is definitely bigger than Texas."
Zoo hypothesis is a poor solution. My favorite is simply the vastness of space and time. They are there (or were there or will be there) but it is like the chances of an emperor penguin naturally encountering a T. rex.
Great simile! 🤓 I think you're right. We don't know how common life is, or how common spaceflight is. I expect they are rare and vanishingly rare. The Universe is monstrous big. Life could be popping up and dying out all around and we'd never know.
@@tonytaskforce3465 Agree 100%. My personal; hypothesis that the vast majority of all planets are sterile, but a small percentage have some form of life on them, leaving literally millions of planets with microbial life) . Only a very small percentage of those would harbor any multicellular life. Only a very small percentage of those will have life analogous to insects etc. Only a very small percentage of those would have animals with any sense of forethought, such as a coyote or elephant. Only a small percentage of those would have life that would could create primitive tools. Only a small percentage of those would have life that could create fire at will. Only a small percentage of those would have anything that resembles civilization, such as buildings and government. And only a small percentage of those would have technology to the level of radio communication, and only a small percentage of those would be space faring, and only a small percentage of those would also exist at the same time as us or each other, leaving almost zero chance of any two space faring civilizations from encountering one another.
People complain that octopi are unlikely to have discovered fire, but that's short sighted. We can't live in a steel furnace. It's an artificial environment that we construct to hold the fire. Octopi can function on land, and there is plenty of firewood on the beaches. Even more in preindustrial times.
Great filter is natural selection. It is also an argument for why we should find a few, very intelligent species, because every impact, mass extinction, cosmic conditional filter, will prune the dumb life and select for intelligent / adaptable life. That filter doesn't need to mean nobody at all, just nobody anywhere near us (at least very unlikely) -- the most likely answer by this logic is that we're the first/only in our galactic neighbourhood, but not the universe.
I love the concept, and I like the people. As much as I enjoyed the conversation, there are sadly some sore spots all over the place, you could improve on in another round: The rules of the discussion are not clear enough to your parcipitiants, leading to logical inconsiticies in the rating process. Mostly, solutions get mixed up. For example, in the "interstellar is impossible" hypothesis the question of timespans is irrevelvant. Longlivety or stabilety of civilisationsiare other possible solutions. If you use another hypothesis to dismiss the one on hand, you can mix up an arbitrary number of solutions to defuse the fermi paradox. Of course, in reality, if we are alone, it will most probably be an interplay of factors that led to a universe mostly devoid of technological civilisations. But that is not the point of this discussion. A tier list is usefull to lay a basis to a more complex discussion, if you jump ahead to complex arguments, combinig items, istead of comparing them one to one, your tier-list gets kind of useless There are some other flaws. "I don't like this argument" should not count as a viable basis for discussion. Or, if you (like me) enjoy the entertaining aspect of this and/or other decisions based on reflected subjectivism, you could gamefy it and give everyone three subjectivity-jokers to employ during the course of the discussion. My point is: Please do this format again, I enjoyed it A LOT! But change it, treading it as a game, developing its form episode to episode. Also, you could keep all participiants as co-hosts, it would be great to watch them evolve as players over iterations of this game. Perhaps you could even sometimes adopt roles, like "avovcatus diabolus" or "galactic prosecutor". Or sometimes invite guests like David Kipping, Isaak Arthur or my beloved John Michael Godier, perhaps being put in the role of protagonists to be cross-examinied or playing "against" the antagonistic hosts. As you see, I loved the unique video and wish you the best of luck with experimental formats on your channel.
Yeah it was too much of that in this discussion. Like interstellar travel being impossible getting an A. Bruh, they figured out how to get to Proxima in 100 years using Nuclear Pulse Propulsion…in the 70s. And that was us using bombs not requiring fusion, the hard part. Politics is the main reason we haven’t already built a probe and sent it to Proxima.
@@maniacslap1623 True, but the hypothetical isn't the same as practical application. Maybe sending unmanned probes is the easy part, but actually colonizing(or even seeding life without actually moving the intelligent life to another star system) is what inevitably falls apart. Similar to the Great Filters(or it is in itself a filter), it could just be that trying to expand takes so longer with such a high rate of failure that given billions of years, in all the places we've looked so far, intelligent life as we understand it just hasn't been able to establish a Galactic Empire of sorts.
@@GiggaGMikeE great response fam. I’d counter your statement of practicality with this. The voyager probes have been going strong for about 50 years. Building something that could last 100 years is doable in practice. The whole subject of what’s practical or not would depend on who/what you’re asking. Imagine a race of people that don’t understand the concept of something like war. They’d be a lot more open to something like nuclear pulse propulsion than we were in the middle of the Cold War. Or a race with no concept of money. They wouldn’t get hamstrung on something like a budget. A race with a 300 year lifespan, what would be practical for them? All that to say, there’s a ton shyt that holds humanity back. What’s practical or not is very subjective. If we found out the whole solar system was being vanquished in a millennia, a lot of shyt becomes practical lol
Advanced spacefaring civilization are likely exceedingly rare in the current era so we shouldn't be surprised when we look further back in time at distant galaxies with our modern but still primitive tech that we don't detect much of anything and even when we think we've found unusual anomalies/signals our tech currently isn't sensitive enough to make/confirm the type of unambiguous conclusions we are after, just look at the phosphine detection on Venus even though Venus is next door, kinda makes humanity seem a little impatient and delusional with that context in mind. In any case what we likely have here is a galaxy where microbial life does emerge more than a handful of times but long lasting space faring civilizations don't. Not only that but when they do rarely come into being they are hopelessly diluted by the vastness of both space and time so extinction comes long before interactions or even detectability becomes feasible so in short its a combo of a few solutions great filters (cosmic scale natural selection), physical constraints on space travel, very rare intelligent space faring civilizations, maybe we are a bit early, our instruments still have a ways to go and something no1 wants to consider and that is building obvious/detectable sprawling megastructures we like to imagine isn't actually feasible, practical, incentivized or safe. Anyway great topic & guests would like to see more with other astronomy/astrobiology related science communicators and experts.
"Interstellar travel is too difficult" is the obvious answer. It's not impossible, but without FTL all of those sci-fi dreams of interstellar civilizations are SUPER silly. The whole "If one in a thousand makes it then someone has to explore everything" argument doesn't make sense. It's a massive amount of energy, resources, and time and nobody has unlimited versions of any of those. One doesn't follow the other at all.
"Interstellar travel too difficult" is probably the least plausible idea of them all. We already have sufficient technology to do it, albeit slowly. And nobody says aliens can't be a little more patient. Even humans in the past thought nothing of building monuments that would take decades, or occasionally even centuries to complete. And that's all you need to get from one star to the next. Even with present day technology.
@@frasercain That's a new group of people who'll go on their own path. How does one form a coherent international civilization when nobody can talk to each other, much less have any real influence? Time can't be discounted here. Civilizations can live in die before someone could send a physical thing from one star system to another.
I read the Three-Body books by Cixin Liu and wanted to point out there was a misunderstanding. Dark Forest doesn't have a bully species going around, poking fun of the galactic neighborhood. Rather than there being a bully species going around taking from others, the theory suggests that every civilization is afraid of making their presence known, because if they do then any other civilization can launch an "anonymous" strike on the solar system to ensure their own survival. If any one civilization was going around being a bully (being a LOUD species), any other civilization could launch an attack (the book suggests photoids) to eliminate the threat. There are no "bullies", the threat is everyone else.
We may not be the first intelligent civilization, probably even far from it. 'Intelligent' In the confines of the fermi paradox means the ability to spread throughout interstellar space, and manipulate solar systems to our whims. If there were civiliazations out there like us, it would be almost impossible for them to see us in our current technological state.
It's very possible to have an intelligent civilization without space travel. Humans did it for thousands of years. Dinosaurs proved being big and bad was better than being smart. It also takes a very long time for evolution to happen. We may be the lucky ones in our corner of the galaxy.
We're not even #1 on Earth, more like #7 or #8, and that could be generous, since our own human bias on what constitutes intelligence is inescapable. We created the test with us as the definition of intelligence, how laughably ignorant of us.
Simulation theory. You surmise that the entire universe would have to be simulated, and that would take more power than the universe to create. Consider that you only have to simulate those parts of the universe that is being observed by humans at any one time, not all of it.
Yes! And really, you don't even need to do a proper simulation in most cases - you just need to make the monkey believe it. For the average dude on the street, that might be no more than some light hypnosis to ignore the inconvenient bits. Keeping the secret might be a tad harder for all those pseudo-autonomous space telescopes and land observatories recording stuff 24/7.
I’d like to think Earth is an anthill in the middle of a dense remote forest . I mean, would **you** look for a specific anthill in the middle of the huge forest in Oregon?
@@davegold We can only barely get the basics of what might make for a habitable planet in a very narrow scope in our relatively immediate vicinity. We're hardly looking "throughout the universe". It's like sticking your nose out a window to see if you can smell a pie that was baked thousands of miles away hundreds of years ago and determine if you'd like the taste of said pie.
Of all the great SF out there it's hard to believe these educated intelligent people pick such a hack TV series like Star Gate as the best SF on TV, Maybe Moiya should try watching something else?
I've watched all of it. I'd put the Expanse as number one, followed by For All Mankind, and then probably Stargate. Babylon 5 was pretty good too. But Stargate beats Star Wars or Star Trek.
As an animal, I'd say it's simple. The transformation of very intelligent animals to a wise species , can't happen fast enough to make it off any planet successful.
@Apistevist ok. I've looked it up. Yes ,I agree. That too. When females have babies to good looking men, that have less maturity, intelligents, and low morals. This will tend a society to dysgenics. Crappy public schools don't help us either.
Or, it's possible that what we consider intelligence is actually very narrow and isn't as conducive to a species surviving on other planets as well as it did for Humans on Earth. Hell, on Earth human-styled intelligence can be more harm than good(especially as we evolved). Sound base instincts, high birth rates, with a minimized energy cost seems to be much more viable long term than being able to make tools and ponder reality for most of Earth's history.
there is life out there that experiences emotions and thought just like us. god separated us millions of light years away for a reason. we will never know 100%, but they are 100% out there. does anybody els agree with my take? I love god and science and firmly believe you can love both.
Regarding the simulation hypothesis, you need to talk to a programmer, specifically a game developer. You don't have to simulate every atom in every celestial body in the universe, you only have to have a good model for each to simulate the relatively few photons that reach us from all of those objects.
I totally agree. I don't understand some scientists optimism that life is easy when observation says it is not. Not only do we not see life spontaneously occur, our best science has no idea how it would. Observation tells us the steps required from a pool of amino acids to self replicating life are cosmically unlikely. We may be the only lucky ones, just like it appears.
@@brucehansensc The problem with something being "cosmically unlikely" means it's also cosmically likely, the cosmos being a pretty big place, with lots of time and space for even the most unlikely things to eventually happen.
@@psterud That's why I choose "cosmically" to show that the scales might be similar. The knowable universe and time are big but finite. Cosmically unlikely does mean what it says. An "ah ha" moment could change the probability. Lets keep looking but believe what we see. Science is observation not faith.
This is one of my favorite episodes. Loads of fun and provided a new perspective on the Fermi Paradox. It's also nice to see really young scientists who seem to have fun in this activity. Thanks so much for all you do, Frazier.
This whole idea that "we should see them" is just so ridicules. If there would be bit more advance civilization then us on Alpha Centauri that is living on earth -ike planet and using lasers to communicate instead of radio waves WE WOULD NOT SEE THEM. They act like mapping 5% of stars in our sky is somehow evidence of something. Its just frustrating to watch SO many stupid assumptions that they made that are just result of very limited human perspective.
Very good discussion. I think the answer combines almost everything in tiers S through C. The exception is interstellar travel being impossible. I think it's more difficult than we understand, perhaps to the point of being impractical.
The thing with the simulation hypothesis... if we suppose that we're really in a simulation, and that the beings running the simulation are accurately simulating the universe we think we're in, we're still lacking an explanation of the Fermi paradox. It still seems like there should be aliens.
Well, unless other life was not programmed into the simulation. Or if it was, maybe it's only one "intelligent civilization" per galaxy or something equally restrictive.
Dakotah, 12:30 r.e. simulation theory, "simulating every atom" ... No, no, no; look at QM and simulation together: Not every atom is simulated, if simulation theory is correct. Stuff can be simulated in the aggregate; it is only when we look at atomic effects that atomic simulation is needed. Look at the wave/particle behavior. Wave behavior is simpler, therefore preferred; but when we are looking at individual particles, then the simulation switches to simulating individual particles. The so-called "collapse of the probability waveform" (when observing particle behavior) is simply the simulator changing gears for our benefit. That is precisely the strongest evidence we have of simulation theory: The fact that behavior follows the type of observation. Reciprocally, simulation theory is probably the best, or ONLY way to understand QM: The wave/particle duality is simply an optimization hack. Why *_make_* a tree falling in the forest make a sound when nobody's hearing? Save some cycles! EDIT: Circa 23:00 Moiya doesn't understand Dark Forest. It's not about species having evolved to hide or to fight back. EVERY species, regardless of local tendencies or behaviors, is logically compelled to hide, in the galactic stage, given the uncertainty as to how other civilizations compare in war-fighting capabilities. Uncertainty is fully baked-in, given that a civilization can go from bows and arrows to nukes in only a few centuries, which fluctuations can hide behind the latencies of information flow at interstellar distances; and where it can't, it can hide behind physical travel latencies. If you know civilization X is developing bows and arrows, right this moment, and you send a few ships to conquer them, once your ships get there they might find civilization X having anti-matter weapons and whatnot, far more advanced than your own. Dark Forest theory is actually the most logical. EDIT2: Last but not least, these Fermi solving theories are not all mutually exclusive. The truth might be a blend.
I am going to make an assumption that Dakota was purposely giving overly skeptical answers for the content. Noway someone devoting so much time, money, and life to planetary sciences could have such negative imagination to what might be possible.
My particular sect of Christianity believes that God has far more children than one planet can test, so He has created many "earths" like ours. A lot of these solutions to the Fermi Paradox are familiar to me in a religious context. That said, discussions on the Fermi Paradox always seem to devolve into the same evidence-less speculation and charged feelings that many religious musings do. The Fermi Paradox is a fascinating philosophical exercise in attempting to explain observations without empirical evidence, but without proper - controlled, repeatable, perturbative, unbiased, reviewed - experimentation, it's no more scientific than any other empirically unsubstantiated debate.
I found this paper "Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?" quite compelling. Oh and thanks for a great discusion.
I high tech homeostasis would prevent the full civilization from initiating interstellar contact, but it would be less likely to restrain eccentric individuals and dissident groups. Maybe aliens are visiting us but won't talk in the open because they know they lack the necessary authority, or don't want to get mixed up in a planetary society again.
To me the Fermi Paradox solutions break down into two main groups: 1.) We're truly alone/unique 2.) Intelligent life exists elsewhere but we just can't see it yet (or maybe ever) Group 1 includes things like we're in a simulation and life was only created here to study, or God only created life here, or going from single to multi-cell life is actually insanely rare, or intelligence is insanely rare. Group 2 includes things like the dark forest, great filter, prime directive, our tech not being good enough, etc. Some of them naturally blend together, but ultimately those feel like the two options. To me the solutions in group 1 are the most interesting scientifically because they automatically prompt the follow on question of "why?"
To me, group 2 is more exciting, because it prompts the question How? How can we peek around this limitation? Even accurate Why? answers rarely settle the curiosity.
So fun! Fraser this is the most enjoyable tier list I have ever watched. I found myself smiling through the entire 2 hour journey and was disappointed that it had to end. Excellent hosting, great colleague insights, a true RUclips gem! Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it
Agreed! It was a great conversation and exploration of philosophy of existence. I liked the rating system too. Not too serious and open minded which I loved
I think our tech is the most important bottle neck when we talk about detecting other intelligent life forms. Because light year travel time prohibits us from observing planets that are light years away in our current present time, due to the vast distance and the speed of light, any planet we observe would be a past version, not a current/present version of that planet. So complex life could have developed but all we can see is just the planet before any activity happens.
Rare Earth is definitely my number 1 choice.... Now throw in the vast distances between Earth like planets + Drake equation and civilizations are just rare and too far apart (causally disconnected).
The more I learn about biology, astronomy, geography and chemistry the more mindboggling it becomes which conditions and historical events had to be just right for complex life to even be a thing here. Could there be another civilization inside our own Galaxy? Maybe, but I wouldn't be surprised if we are among the most advanced in the universe. The fact alone that our star just happened to travel out into a relatively calm region of space and has only been disturbed just a little bit by a brown dwarf, who zipped by a few hundred thousand years ago, is crazy. could've easily been life-ending if we were in a more crowdy area.
intelligence + body form. sampling earth evo, very, very few species that could be physically capable of manipulating environ to make tech discoveries needed for advance communication. there was a dino that *maybe* with evolved intelligence could have, but there just haven't been many candidates. could be it's just an incredible outlier to develop advanced ability.
@@extollo the Silurian hypothesis hasn't been completely ruled out. Imagine a naturally very skittish smaller dino got pretty advanced at some point and they went underground when things got bad. All the while they just kept on advancing and being perfectly content living underground. Might even be under a kilometer of ice for all we know and they are probably not very large in numbers either. Then all of a sudden they get spooked by our underground nuclear tests. I mean, that definitely would have been a "wow, what are those underdeveloped hairy apes doing? Better start keeping an eye on them" hence all the UAP-sightings near Nuclear facilities.
Yeah that's basically my opinion. There is probably a lot of Intelligent life but it's spread out very far over distance and time.
@@Roguescienceguymost advanced in the universe? I just can't fathom that with how many billions of years there were before us for life to advance.
I think the grabby alien's hypothesis is pretty compelling to us being among the first. I guess you could call this one Rare Intelligence too. I liked Dakotah's answer here about the hard steps from going from simple life to complex. It really is one of the single best pieces of data that we have towards the answer to the Fermi Paradox. That combined with the null results from all our searches, the other big piece of data we have, is basically the grabby aliens hypothesis. I think both of these should be S-tier. If you are reading this and haven't heard of the grabby alien's hypothesis, search for the video from PBS Spacetime. It is a good summary. You can also find the paper titled Grabby Aliens where they walk through their full argument and the math behind it. It is pretty easy to read in terms of science papers, and is very compelling.
I agree with Fraiser on one point for Dark Forest, any species powerful enough to be a threat already knows we’re here. Hiding is pointless
How would they know? Life on the Earth and Earth civilization are undetectable from the closest star much less anywhere else. Also interstellar travel is quite literally impossible so menacing aliens cannot get here if they wished to eat us all.
So the conclusion would be, we are already doomed.
@@technokicksyourass or there’s nothing out there (that wants us dead and is a legitimate threat at least)
Any ETI that knows of us and views us as a threat will resort to a relativistic kill weapon. The kill-shot will come at us at or very near the speed of light. We’ll have vanishingly little time to react, very little chance of saving ourselves even if we do react.
Given that Earth has been broadcasting the presence of life for roughly 2 billion years ETI has had oodles of time to do something about us. We’re still here suggesting that no ETI within hundreds of lightyears feels threatened by us. Or there is no ETI within hundreds of lightyears.
Our broadcasts have spread to a miniscule portion of the galaxy. Some small fraction of a percent. Dark Forrest could be true, we just may not be noticed for another few million years.
People try to pick "a solution" when i think it's lots of them combined, with each one lowering the chances of us seeing intelligent life near us.
Also, a lot of them already overlap on their own. "Self-Destruction," "Rare Intelligence," and "Interstellar Travel is Impossible" are really just restating different layers of "The Great Filter." "We're the First" and "We're Alone" are just describing a universe where the early filters are extremely strong. All the ideas describing alien behavior can all be true across many individual cultures at the same time.
Some solutions may be that there's an either/or situation between different solutions. Perhaps there's an either/or situation between self-destruction or finding the "better way". Perhaps there's an either/or situation between whether interstellar travel is possible or life creating or evolving into post-biological beings: Life putting some version of themselves onto computers that can be accelerated more quickly, or more speculatively, turning into an energy being that could travel in something like holoships from Red Dwarf.
Yeah, it's definitely a combination. Although I think "rare intelligence" and possibly "life is rare" are the most likely top reasons why we see/hear nothing. Even if intelligent life is rare, it's certainly plausible to still have dozens of civilizations at any given time in a galaxy that are so far from each other that catching a glimpse or a signal is extremely difficult if not impossible. The galaxy is BIG.
You can make an Anti-Drake Equation out of that.
People always hate on me for really liking the Dark Forest hypothesis but it's like.... In a practically infinite universe it probably is true to an extent, along with a ton of other hypotheses. Thing is it's not really about picking the flavor you fancy because it's the coolest, a ton of them likely do overlap.
my only disappointment is that you didn't include Isaac Arthur, President of the National Space Society, considering he has an entire youtube series covering fermi paradox solutions.
It’s possible he was asked, but wasn’t able to do it.
You should check out P E Rowe. He has a year of weekly sci fi short audiobooks based on Isaac Arthur's topics. As talented as Asimov, Heinlein, or Le Guin, imho.
Considering there's an entire series worth of perspectives, would it fit into a 2-hour video?
Someone else asked the same question in the comments here and Fraser answered that he has had many collaborations with Isaac Arthur in the past and he said he wanted to add additional voices to the conversation.
I know they’ve colaborated before, maybe it just didn’t work this time or maybe he wanted to switch it up a little IDK. Either way Isaac is a gentleman and isn’t exactly hurting for exposure right now.
With regard to Dakotah Tyler's comments on the simulation hypothesis, he had two criticisms:
1. to simulate every atom in the universe, would require a computer larger than the universe.
2. It makes no sense to simulate an entire universe, and then only put one planet of life in it.
But what if these two ideas are complimentary... what if to get around 1, they only simulate the parts of the universe at the detail and scale they need for the people on the single planet to have a compelling view of the rest of the universe, without simulating all the atoms of every star out there. In fact, that's how many modern computer games work, simulating finer grained details only as you get close enough for those details to become relevant to the view (Or whenever you zoom in on them with a telescope etc).
In that case, the simulation of only one world with conscious observers, might help them to solve the issue with the information theory and computational power issues involved.
I give it a C+. Only a little higher, but still.
Yes, Dakota doesn't really understand how computer programmers think, and therefore how computer programs work.
They get optimised as much as possible to use as little resources as possible, it would be ridiculous to simulate "every atom in the universe"
@@sssfulton yeah, when you think about the amount of photons we get from distant galaxies, its literally just a handful of photons per hour that get collected over days to accumulate a visual picture, this shows how little processing it could take to simulate distant galaxies / universe
no mans sky fr
Why do we keep assuming that our universe is the same size as the one simulating it?
A little bit higher than C+, like C++?
I also like the idea of 'dumb aliens'. Consider if the dinosaurs weren't interrupted this planet would likely still be theirs.
And whats to say they would not have developed intelligence? Birds are dinosaurs, despite their tiny brains, eg crows are surprisingly intelligent and not too far from the apes we evolved from.
@@vertigo2893 they ruled earth for 165 million years without the need of higher intelligence because intelligence isn't necessary for existence.
The late paleontologist Dr. Stephen Jay Gould discussed this in one of his books. (I think it was “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”.) He believed that life was very common in the universe but intelligent life was extremely rare. He argued that if, for example, the asteroid that wiped out the non avian dinosaurs had missed the Earth that intelligent life might have never arisen.
He mentioned that during the age of the dinosaurs that there was no trend towards increasing intelligence at all. He said that even allegedly intelligent dinosaurs like velociraptors weren’t as smart as modern-day corvids like crows and ravens. And of course, with dinosaurs out of the way that let mammals, including us, to flourish.
@@bbartky I would imagine that the asteroid was just the thing that wiped out the dinosaurs *first.*
Life is, first of all, adaptable -- but only if allowed enough time. The dinosaurs were very well-adapted to their environment, but it changed faster than most of them could adapt to keep up with. And sooner or later, some kind of sudden change is inevitable -- very few things in the universe are constant. If it wasn't the asteroid it would've been something else.
Mind you, that kind of change to Earth's history would probably render all subsequent life unrecognizable by the time you reach the modern day. Any intelligent life might not resemble humans at all.
@@vertigo2893It's not the intelligent life only, it's the intelligent civilisation. Orcas are very intelligent but they don't build computers or planes or perform surgeries.
Nice. I had waited to listen to this until i had a nice drive and it was well worth it. Though, I was wondering about the 420 hypothesis where it is the scenario that they show in movies when someone gets "altered" mentally and wonders if our solar system isnt just an atom in a fingernail of a larger being 😅
We are one of many cilvizations, but due to the size of Universe, our Light Cones will never intersect :(
💯%
I used too many words to say something similar
Agreed this is the most compelling to me. I dont think there is a practical way to go faster than light. I think the self replicating robots angle is just a cop out and in reality isnt possible, I think the distance is too far for even that to practically function. The universe is full of life its just a bunch of islands so far way from each other and the sea between is to treacherous for anything to survive the journey,.
This is the premise of the novel Spin.
Humans have been doing science for 400 years. .. The universe is 14,000,000,000 years old.
General Relativity theory is not the end of physics.
But what is the bottleneck that prevents the universe from having a higher density of civilizations? Would you expect other nearby planets with an environmental suited for life, but having no life? Planets with actual simple life forms? With complex animals?
a simulation would not have to simulate the whole universe, it would have to simulate only our perception of the universe
yeah but as Moiya points out, at that point you're just arguing Plato. Like sure, I can walk through my hometown in a dream, with huge holes in logic everywhere, and as long as I'm not lucid dreaming my brain just goes with it. You can't test for something you're not conscious of. However, I think this theory breaks down because it requires 100% perfection. You can lucid dream. Not only can you lucid dream, you can start lucid dreaming IN a non-lucid dream, AND this is an actual, teachable skill. If our simulated universe requires this to be the dream state for our higher conscious minds to be in, then it should have the same problems dreams have. And if you can learn to become, say, 'super-lucid' this by definition should make you aware of the simulation, the same way lucid dreaming automatically makes you aware that you're dreaming. But not only has this never been observed, among spiritualists and similar who claim to be able to reach a higher consciousness, they've never recognized anything even resembling a simulation. That immediately fails the sniff test for me.
@@z-beeblebroxOur perception of the world around us is largely reconstructive. Our map of the cosmos is even more reconstructive. Whenever we, as an example, detect signs of alien transmission our first assumption is that the highly sensitive and temperamental equipment we are using must be at fault.
@@DigitalDustChan None of that is what the OP is trying to argue for. But IMO - and this goes both ways - any signal that's not strong enough that we know with certainty it's from an intelligent civilization, isn't worth detecting, period. It's problematic enough dealing with decades-long gaps between replies, if there's error involved as well we'd be better off not realizing it's for real in the first place.
@@z-beeblebrox this would not be Plato, this would be you being an NPC and shouting all day "This is a good day for fishing" while bumping into trees and changing direction randomly ... except you don't perceive that because you don't have code for it.
Talking about simulations is meaningless: if it is a simulation anything goes. Maybe even this conversation is scripted, and the player characters will get clues to complete quests from this thread.
@@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi imo this line of thinking is nothing but a waste of time. So yes, exactly like Plato :P
I remember reading a story about a hiker who got lost in Japan. This kind of baffled me, because surely if you walk in a straight line in Japan for a few kilometres you're bound to bump into a farm, city, railway, highway... I mean, it's pretty densely populated. But you can't see a city 25km away if you're in the woods. Space may well be the same, but we haven't really got the ability to see all that far. In 100+ years when we've surveyed the whole galaxy with future super telescopes and haven't found anything, then it gets interesting.
Japan is mostly mountains, only densely populated around the coastline.
@@HAL-vu8efand there's no cure for autism either. Facts are interesting.
@@brick6347but he was right about the inland of Japan only being scarcely populated. You shouldn't have started your otherwise perfectly good explanation with some rather dumb observation. You don't have to be autistic to know how the population in Japan is concentrated along the shoreline. Not being American definitely helps too😂
In a survival class we were told that you follow any flow of water down stream.
On the dark forest, many of our creatures are brightly colored, and make noise to scare away others.
12:40 You don't have to simulate a whole universe - you just simulate the sense perceptions of the simulated minds ostensively observing that universe and that live within it, for example. That approach would be far more focused and can be as »low-resolution« as the simulated senses of the entities you're interested in simulating to begin with.
Time and distance is the biggest filter: Odds are against any peoples being at level of sophistication that they can find and begin communication with another peoples of the same mindset. There might be someone thinking almost the same as we do but they are three galaxies away and the odds of us finding each other are next to zero.
I agree distance is the answer thats it
YES! I just wrote something similar, that distance, both of space and of time would seem to DOMINATE any discussion of the Fermi Paradox. Any notion we have of a single 'society' or a single 'culture' would seem to collapse when considering a species that might split to live on two different worlds, perhaps even in the same stellar system. The delays in communication, the challenges in maintaining ANY sort of sustainable and directed purpose on geological time, it seems maybe it's just too much to expect of complex, dynamic living things. And that's if Abiogenesis itself has even a shot of occurring, which based on what little I know, seems an almost impossible expectation. Even the simplest form of life seems like a complex factory of components that function together in harmony and order, but completely without a conductor, an overseer or anything like that. Just how likely or unlikely is Abiogenesis to occur on a suitable location in the cosmos, be that a moon, planet, wherever. It's a frustrating question because our example of one only tells us the possibility is somewhere between 0 and 1, but it could be arbitrarily-close to 0 so that no matter how large the Universe, no matter how many liquid water worlds orbiting in the habitable zone of long-lived red dwarf stars, maybe Abiogenesis itself has only EVER happened once, here on Earth. Man, I hope that's not true. We must explore the oceans of our solar system's moons ....
My problem with many of these is that they have to account for ALL life. Any scenario where a species has to choose an option (go ethereal, stay home, don't spend extravagant energy, ...) may apply to SOME species, but not ALL. For me any solution has to be caused by nature/physics or there will be exceptions that we might detect. Anything else goes straight in the D-bucket for me.
The most plausable to me is a combination of rarity and not having looked wide enough - in other words, they exist, but are far and few between and we just need to keep looking (possibly for millennia to come).
Personally, I think a combination of the following factors makes the most sense:
1. Vast Distances(I feel like no matter how educated you are, it's really easy to handwaive the absolutely massive distances between planets, star systems, galaxies, and so forth)
2. Narrow scope of the places and methods we've looked for intelligent life(We really are just shining a laser pointer into the corner of a dark forest and assuming no life exists because the light didn't land squarely on Sasquatch's forehead)
3. Narrow definition of what we would consider "intelligence" (i.e. assuming intelligence = technological expansion across space at ever increasing power demands)
4. Timing (For instance, there could have been alien species relatively close to or greater than human intelligence, but say, lived 100 million years ago and went extinct after 100 thousand years)
5. Great Filters (I am more inclined to believe most of the filters are behind us, but some like the conditions needed to grow technologically are specific enough that there are probably tons of planets with life thats somewhere between single celled bacteria and the dinosaurs, but almost none that got to the "mining the planet for ancient stores of fossil fuels if they even have that equivalent to power their technology" stage)
6. We're the First/There are no advanced civilizations(tied in with 1 and 2 - It could just be that there hasn't been any other advanced intelligent life that developed in the relatively small amount of space we've looked at so far. Doesn't mean there isn't 100 star faring civilizations in Andromeda, but just that there aren't any Galactic Empires nearby)
In a nutshell, it's a lack of scope combined with just the vast distances/timescales and what we consider intelligence being heavily dependent on our own evolution that answers the Fermi Paradox. I don't think there are any invisible civilizations "hiding the truth" from us, but instead that life is possibly prolific, and space is just like, really, really big on timescales that don't mesh well with our current standards.
I miss the weekly space hangout, but thank you for helping me find Moiya again! And thanks for promoting new and amazing talent. Found Dakotah a while back thanks to you as well. Amazing everyone! Thanks!
I think you guys got it completely wrong with the simulation. Like, first, why do you assume every atom in the universe would have to be simulated? Do you now how video games/ virtual environments are rendered? Computer only renders in detail the thing we are interacting with, everything else kinda doesnt exist. Sounds quite quantum, doesnt it? :D
Also, the if the base universe is much larger, complex then our universe, as real as it seems, could be their equivalent of Minecraft. Does Steve in Mincraft say it would be impossible to have a computer simulate all that Minecraft wolrd because, according to his Minecraft physics, it would take a computer bigger than the entire Minecraft universe?
I brought that up. The simulation doesn't tell us anything about base reality. The Sims think they're living in reality, but it's nothing like the real world.
@@frasercain But it got a D :(
@@frasercain but, you could optimize it well enough that it could skip simple steps to get the end result pretty well, and you could probably see those skips if you developed the science enough. just like how computers can make circles out of triangles.
you have to think bigger - out of the box. like, what if the real universe is 1 brazillian times larger than our sim, and there is no speed of light limit limit, and it's 20-dimensions, and everyone gets a pony, and there is no 2nd law of thermodynamics, and math is way easier. not a single rule or observation or technique or limit we see can be assumed to apply in the the outer reality. that's where the argument fails for me not that it's unbelievable or impossible - but it's unfalsifiable. so might as well get on with the other ideas unless 'they' give us a hint.
yea but still the simulation hypothesis doesn’t tell anyone anything. Like maybe it’s a simulation in a simulation in a simulation but so what none of that gets you anywhere.
I think the biggest answer is intelligent civilizations rise and fall by either killing themselves off or suffering some calamity beyond their control like and asteroid, gamma ray burst or even volcanos that cause extiction. Advanced civilizations rarely coexist and if so, distance is the problem
This was great, everyone seemed to have a good time
If we live in a simulation, our ENTIRE experience of the entire universe is still INSIDE the simulation and we’d have zero idea of the real size and power abilities of entities outside this simulation.
If we're in a simulation, it is highly likely our simulators were simulated as well, and likely in a similar simulation to our own.
@@psterud yeah. We might be running in a virtual machine on a god-like version of Kitboga's laptop.
@@IARRCSim Yikes, that would imply that none of our transactions, social or otherwise, were real. We would merely be pawns with the sole purpose of angering the bad gods.
The nearby star flyby in 1.3 million years is Gliese 710. I've already made plans to visit.
Right, that's the one.
Nice, I booked the week off months ago
would it have killed you to post the chart that you have at the end. This is probably the 2nd or 3rd time I have listened to this one. I don't think you would lose that many viewers.
In case you haven't figured it out, this was a great podcast.
42:32 - I really have to disagree. “Life forms really early” is not some universal fact, it’s just what we observed in our particular case. After all, we only have a sample size of one.
Until we see evidence of life forming equally early elsewhere in the universe, it’s much more correct to say “OUR life formed really early”, and to use that to *support* the “we’re first” argument, rather than to refute it.
we have the sample size of all different species on our planet, if you don't believe in all life stems from a single random cell.
In essence, it boils down to being unable to compare just one sample. The earliness or not of our life is irrelevant, since some other life might've taken longer. If we rank all known life-forms and first is the one with a rank one, then we are the first since we only know one. I think it's a red herring to point to our lateness or earliness. On the other hand, having seen our recent rapid technological advancements, if we assume an earlier-than-us alien life, it must be communicating or at least producing waste heat - not being to observe that, in my opinion, is the real argument for us being first.
I agree. Also, as far as we know, life only started once here. If we had seen left- and right handed DNA or anything else that could point to multiple origins of live, then it would be a much stronger argument.
"We are first" is one of my favorite because it's 100% true for some alien species out there.
Maybe us, but definitely for someone.
I personally think the Fishbowl hypothesis is most accurate. Life is common; even multi-cellular life is common. Even intelligence is not all that rare. Yet, civilization with technology and access to the cosmos is extremely rare. Most life will evolve with water inside an ice bound planet or moon. And even if intelligence happens and creates a form of civilization, the chances to discover space faring tech is so extremely improbable. It took humans 2 million years to get to this early point of space travel.
Modern humans have only existed for 300,000 years, not 2 million.
A friend had a sci fi short story idea: life evolves on an ocean planet with an ice layer. They never evolve eyes but just advanced sonar. They drill through the ice, look at a star filled universe, but hear nothing think the ice is the edge of their universe and go back under water
@@thatfuzzypotato1877 Great idea, but i think they could still detect stuff from the outside, like a meteorite hitting the ice from above, some sort of atmosphere and pressure on the outside, maybe with some winds and the sound of the wind
@@krumuvecisyeah, not a perfect idea, mostly just a way to explore how limited senses could blind a race to the greater universe
It took less than 100 years to go from flight to escape of our solar system though. Seems like technological advance is on an exponential curve so might not be so far off to making self replicating probes.
I'm a video game programmer. The behavior of photons (wave to particle on interaction) is the same way we optimize physics in games. Gravity can also be explained by processing speed. each tick of time is the length of time needed to run the simulation in that given area. The more calculations needed, the slower time moves. So the more matter in an area, the more calculations needed per tick. It would work this way if each Plank Length is a processor of fixed processing speed.
As far as simulations being visibly different is incorrect, that's not what we do as game developers. We find a simulation that gives the same results with lower resolution. A fractal calculation will give as much detail as you can observe and all that accuracy will be correct. WE CAN MAKE THIS NOW., but In a much simpler way.
Looking at the universe from the perspective of high accuracy optimized simulation, the simulation theory is a B or an A.
That doesn't explain base reality though. It doesn't really answer the question, it just shifts it to a new area and pretends to answer it.
@@SuperYtc1 Then that begs the question: What is this "base reality" you're proposing? Sounds to me like an unfalsifiable concept, and therefore lacking current scientific validity. It's just as easy to say that the universe is by its very nature iteratively simulated in both past and future directions, infinitely.
"each Plank Length is a processor" That doesn't make any sense, sorry. Like plank lenght is a 1D concept. We live in a 4D relativistic spacetime continuum here. :) And what exactly you mean by "processor"? Do you mean Von Neumann architecture CPU? Or what? :)
"more matter in an area, the more calculations needed per tick" - What if you have the same number of particles but with different mass? For exmaple the same number of protons vs neutrons. These two systems would have a different mass (and therefore different time dilation) but the same computational requirements. Doesn't work. I think this might be a case of "every problem looks like a nail" kind of bias.
Regarding the game theory argument you made on the Dark Forest Hypothesis, it is only valid for a game with only one interaction. When you have a game with multiple interactions, strategies with good behaviour outperform detrimental ones.
So, shoot first and then immediately switch to diplomacy? Because during first contact, we do not know that there will be a second.
Actually all it takes is for a small percentage of hostile aliens to completely wipe out all the benevolent ones and if benevolent ones happen to witness this, they will cease to be benevolent.
@@justfellover Yeah, but if you have a first contact, it should be natural to assume there will be a second, especially if the contact is relatively close enough that you can have any sort of dialogue(even if it takes 100k years to get a reply). Its one thing to assume you are alone in the universe. Assuming you are alone in the universe... except for that one other group of intelligent people 100 thousand light years away is much less believable.
@@GodWorksOut True, but in that case you'd run into two scenarios:
1. There is only a few civilizations out there and if you are the top dog civilization, you'd likely be able to expand pretty openly while culling weaker civilizations, with your presence being pretty easy to be detect as there wouldn't be anyone to stop you and enough of a technological gap that you could detect and destroy any potential future rivals
2. There are tons of civilizations out there, enough that a single top dog is hard to determine, in which case the fairly constant destruction of other civilizations would be fairly easy to detect
Even if you can't see the other hunters in a dark forest, if it's violent and dangerous enough, there should be carcasses and the sounds of animals being predated.
@@GiggaGMikeE Or regardless of how many, any intelligent species that would have the capability to make themselves known runs the logic and comes to the conclusion to stay quiet, so meetings between civilizations are rare. Doesn't matter how "top dog" you are when anyone can lob a bunch of rocks in your direction at 95% c.
I think the true answer is a combo of a lot of these. I think that the most potent options is the idea that we are one of the firsts and expansionist civilizations kill themselves, and non expansionist civilizations don't feel the need or find is selfish to take the whole universe to themselves.
Would we be able to detect life on Earth if we were like 20 lightyears or more away from Earth with our contemporary state of the art technology? I highly doubt it. And that's your answer. Our technology simply isn't sufficient enough to detect alien life in even our local part of the galaxy. So what paradox?
Well right yes
We discuss exactly that.
One assumption with the Fermi Paradox is that "more advanced" means "much bigger, more impressive and louder". We're pretty close to looking for biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres, we'd be able too see if neighboring intelligences were building dyson spheres and if Von Neuhman probes were mining the moon.
Was this asumption accurate? Hard to tell, we don't even know what technology on Earth will look like in thirty years.
Note that they DO adress that in the video.
Hell, we have trouble identifying intelligent life in our own backyards!
Except know about by radio frequency signals.
The best objection to the "simulation hypothesis" was not the ones they settled on but one they glossed over - it's not a hypothesis at all because it's not falsifiable. I'm 100% with Moiya on the simulation hypothesis.
It's not falsifiable YET. It may never be falsifiable, but we can't say that for sure right now. String Theory, as far as I know, isn't falsifiable yet either, but we sure put a lot of our energy into exploring the concept and its offshoots in recent decades.
I'm only 10 minutes into this but I already feel like you should do this format again but with Isaac Arthur as a guest. That guy has a lot of really clear and in-depth thoughts about this subject matter that might make a video like this very informative to a lot of people.
I've done a lot of collaborations with Isaac, I wanted some new people. :-)
@@frasercain I know you have, it's just that I thought this concept would be right up his alley.
Conversely, I like your new guests but this topic doesn't seem to be one that they have thought an awful lot about. They make some rookie mistakes in their thinking, such as not acknowledging that getting your hands on as much energy as you can is an instrumental goal and that you don't have to explain why _some_ species wouldn't do x and y but why not a single species out there would do x or y.
Yes, he has some really convincing points and counterpoints on some of these (like the "its very improbable, that every single individual adheres to the prime directive"-point Fraser made), that would have made some of the arguments in this video much more easy and helpful.
agree@@unvergebeneid
Word
just because The Dark Forest is a possibility, we should take it seriously
(we need to advance.., but we won't, if we destroy ourselves before.., we need to get our act together, than focus fully on advancement.. ofc reasonable, not fanatically)
When you were talking about "sending a bad idea" to a civilization; I'm pretty sure this is the plot in the 1995 film Species. Good stuff.
Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
One and a half hour into this, I just noticed her name is McTier, and she's doing a tier list. Simulation confirmed.
Loving Moiya's constant Stargate references. ONE OF US!
Same. Star Wars vs Star Trek is irrelevant.
My favourite solution is the evidence horizon. So civilisation spreads across the galaxy like ripples in a pond, falling apart afterwards because of natural processes and the problems of maintaining that civilisation, like distance and time.
So in short, we’re either existing before the first wave, or we missed the last wave and we’re surrounded by ruins and the dead, slowly falling apart all evidence disappearing.
Also, I think the great filter is that little girl!
A simulation of the universe doesn't require a computer with the power of the universe, like Dakotah says. You don't need to simulate every atom. Only things that are observed need a supply of data, which, compared with the size of the universe, is miniscule. Open world video games don't load the entire map into memory the entire time, just what is active on and around what's on the screen. This actually ties in fairly neatly with quantum mechanics and measurement and wave functions. One could take it a step further and apply the holographic principle to make the data requirement much smaller/compressed, since the perceived three-dimensionality of space is contained in only two dimensions. I'm not convinced regarding the simulation hypothesis, but it is certainly a compelling idea. I'd put it in A tier.
Even if you are observing just a part of the universe you still need to simulate down to every elementary particle, and also keep backward consistency of event causality all the way back to the Big Bang. And videogames - which are discretized physical simulations - aren't fully analogous to real physics. Far from it. Especially if you go anywhere beyond basic newtonian mechanics.. For example both quantum mechanics and general relativity are notoriously hard to simulate on Von-neuman computers.
I think we are alone. Multicellular life is incredibly hard and intelligent life even more so. As evidenced right here at home. As an aside, should it turn out we are alone, I think we should just construct a universe full of life where FTL travel is possible , leave the AIs in charge, and go live in there.
Considering the vastness of space, the diversity of life just on this one planet, I can't imaging any solution that involves everyone responding to the same problems in the same way. Humans don't even do that within our own species. There's just far too many unimaginable ways to be.
But there is one 'right way' to respond when you have infinite resources and no natural predators, and life always takes that route. Because if one lifeform doesn't naturally multiply to fill a niche fully, then one that does will take that place for them. On Earth there is limited space, which limits this, but there is no real limit in outer space. The first species to spread exponentially will out compete any that does not.
@@cortster12 If they're aiming for a very-long-term survival, like sometime in the black hole era, then exponential growth might waste resources prematurely. No, there's not a one right way.
@krumuvecis
Exponential survival isn't feasible, and also not something an entire species can decide at once. If 99% slow down their expansion, but 1% do not, then that 1% will become the 99%.
@@cortster12 True, but again, with the vastness of that space, it'd just as possible to assume that what you described is happening 1 billion light years away from us, and only started a million years ago. Expecting to see evidence of it now is like expecting to see a gorilla in your broom closet in the next five minutes to prove that they ever existed at all.
@@cortster12 Unless that 1% encounters a Great Filter that only affects those who try to expand too greatly and get wiped out/wipe themselves out. Humans needed curiosity and desires for more to branch out and evolve technologically, but you can argue that if caution and apprehension were also traits we possessed it'd be very easy for us to have gone extinct as well. And again, that all assumes that we'll eventually just "figure out" long term expansion/living in space/colonizing other planets in the long term. It's possible that it's just not feasible in a way that only becomes clear when you progress a bit further than we are now.
its more likely we self-destructe (or just reset), than attain infinite perfection.., but both are possible
Usually not a SETI guy but was so much fun! Great trio!
Life is rare. Intelligence very, very rare.
Try: Life: 1 per galaxy, Intelligence: 1per galactic cluster.
If the odds are anything like this we should not expect to see or hear from anyone ever. On the other hand, we have vast amounts of useless inaccessible real estate at our disposal.
We're the first.
It's the perfect null hypothesis that doesn't require us to imagine anything that may or may not be happening elsewhere.
Sure, and we don't have to be THE first in the entire universe, just in the area we can meaningfully observe. I think that would be the laniakea supercluster at most, so that still leaves plenty of room to spare for other civilisations that might be out there, just not close enough for us to see.
Even a local first makes me sad. It’s ok though, I’ve become accustomed to sad. Means we are special and we’ve got to care for our planet.
There's just too many filters.
Right chemistry
Stable temperate atmosphere
Liquids
Abiogenisis
Multicellular
Complex
Then I think there's something about the sequence of our evolutionary tree.
Something about spacial awareness in primates when swinging in the trees and then social brain and language.
And then even if another species gets there, they're going to need an atmosphere that supports combustion in order to do metallurgy.
We're not even the first on this planet, let alone the galaxy, or even the solar system.
@@_nebulousthoughts so many filters. We haven’t even defined them all. Australia was still in the Stone Age when Europeans showed up. Why? Economists speculate it’s because there weren’t any long-legged animals to act as beasts of burden for commerce, and thus very slow development. Without Jupiter acting as our comet-sink, we’d have been destroyed many times over. Etc, etc, ad nauseam. We’re unbelievably lucky.
1:43:45 "Who knows if that's something we can actually do." Physicists. Physicists know that we can't use quantum entanglement to transmit information.
I was surprised that the panel dismissed Fraser's zoo/simulation hypothesis. One of the huge advantages of that type of hypothesis is that it completely bypasses the Copernican principle/mediocrity principle, which is arguably the main reason that the Fermi paradox is a paradox to begin with. Where is everybody? if life is so mediocre and common, as it should be based on the sheer numbers, where is everybody? answer: they are common in the universe but we are being hidden from them and nobody is bothering to look for us just like nobody on earth is bothering to find an invisible grain of sand located somewhere on one of the beaches of the earth. Also, the simulation hypothesis doesn't require anything like a simulation of the entire universe, as others have pointed out.
It would require simulating practically all observable universe since the big bang. Otherwise how would you ensure that every observer has the same consistent view of the causal history?
The thing is the zoo hypothesis sounds regarded until you've already heard all the other hypotheses and why they're actually more improbable.
So there needs to be two tiers on the zoo hypothesis: a true zoo, where we are in a pen and they control our environment, and the much more realistic that we are being observed by an expedition Jane Goodall style... Nevermind, this was addressed with the prime directive immidiatly after, lol.
Simulation theory: you don't need to simulate the entire universe, you only have to simulate what we can interact with. So... Back to flat earth's firmament: the only thing simulated is the local world, the rest is only simulated for being visible by our sensors.
Great filters: Another way to analogize great filters is the human factors safety swiss cheese model.
Self destruction: "there's no such thing as an unarmed starship" every technology has a dual use of both peaceful and destructive uses. The ability to broadcast out to other civilizations and beyond comes with the same ability to destroy themselves.
We are first: only if you ignore the UFO phenomenon.
We are alone: absolutely not, the probability is just too astronomical. E might be the first, but not the only, ever.
We can't see them: this could help explain some of the UFO phenomenon as well.
"...does Europa still Europa?" ROFL!!!!!
Post biological lie: "it's just a phase man".... So hippie. Lol. But I like this idea too, a civilization went silicon based.
Hibernation: Basically hyper-isolationist. You'd have to worry about grabby aliens raiding your sleeping civilization.
Our tech isn't good enough: absolutely! The problem with the fermi paradox in the first place: sample bias. We have only sampled an extremely small amount if the galaxy/universe.
Looking in the wrong place: There is an entire area we can't even see past the other side of the milky way galaxy because if all the 'stuff' in the way. So we have a huge astronomical blind spot in our cosmic back yard. Plus dark forest theory would say "stay away from this big beacon of light"
They are already here: (conspiracy theory) I hate how most scientists, astronomers, and thinkers dismiss this explanation so quickly. Anecdotal evidence is still evidence, using our most basic sensors available "our eyes" as one of them said earlier. So the most glaring example that blows all the other theories out of the water, is dismissed quicker than the moderator can get it out of his mouth. "Classified higher than nuclear weapons" (the only reason we know about nuclear technology is because we had to use it. If we didn't use it, it would probably still be a secret. I would be surprised if, in a M.A.D. scenario, that using alien tech isn't one of the options the president has in the nuclear football.
Isn't it conceivable that complex intelligent life and technological civilizations are possible in the Universe, but extremely, extremely unlikely? And we happen to be it, the only winning lottery ticket in the galaxy or the Universe?
The numbers are not on your side.
Yea sounds like 49:00 or maybe 25:53, 44:20. Plausible I think because if there IS a winning ticket, the anthropic principle says we *must* be the ones holding it.
That's damn near impossible. The universe might possibly be infinite. Humans think way too highly of ourselves.
@@LG-km8fw The next closest galaxy - Andromeda - is 2.5 million lightyears away. If there's an average of one intelligent civilization per galaxy (which is WAY higher than OP is estimating here), and assuming the one in Andromeda messages us the moment they know we exist, and assuming the moment we started broadcasting into space we sent a perfect signal out towards them, then we won't know our neighbor civilization exists for another 5 million years. And we won't have the technology to see their biosignature for at least another hundred, but it won't matter because the light from their biosignature won't reach us for 2 to 2.5 million years, depending on how old they are.
Could be, could be. Unless we find another life, we can't really judge the rarity. Currently, as far as we know, we're the only ones in the whole existence
I have had decades to think about the Fermi paradox. 49:we are alone. Uniformity of physics in the background of space says if we find life on the earth, life should have regenerated for billions of years before the oxygenation event. We find life began as a singularity. The Miller Urey experiment and tunneling chemistry in the cold of space show that amino acids are found in asteroids and moons. We dont have a theory or definition of life that predicts life. We find life by comparison. Even if it's panspermia you only push the origin back in time. That's why life is not cause and effect of uniform physics. Life has not been detectable in space as complex proteins for 10.2 billion years. Life on earth is a paradox. You can't seed the earth without complex proteins in Kuiper belt objects. Life is a thin layer on the surface of earth. Levinthal paradox of proteins. The human body 37,000 billion cells, 37.5 trillion symbiotes, Andromeda is only a trillion stars, 80 billion neurons, about as many as the clouds of Milky Way stars, our dna can stretch twice across the solar system, dendrites are 1,000 to 10,000 trillion, Our own thoughts may occur because of Feynman paths and Penrose microtubules. If life is cause effect there would be swarms of Boltzman brain comets. You are a singularity from every generation 37 trillion cells accurately reproduced from one cell. Physics does not predict free will from a swarm of particles. By the same logic life doesn't begin from inert metallicity. It is as though the universe does not have the degrees of freedom. See Y Chromosome Bottleneck at the dawn of civilization, Cambrian Explosion of Life, Origins Revisited by Richard Leakey Jr. Just the 1s2 tip of discovery
I'm with Fraser on the "We're Alone" being in S-tier. No indication that the formation of life is an easy step that just "must happen" on all the other planets that have the right ingredients. That seems like a logical fallacy where people see a large number of potential planets out in the universe and since they can't comprehend that number, assume that somewhere one of those has to be life bearing, when the step to generate life could be 1 over 1000 times that number for all we know. Non-life -> life transition is still too poorly understood to make a claim that it surely happens across other planets.
I think "we're alone" is the saddest scenario possible. Imagine a universe in which Homo sapiens is the most intelligent species
@@fep_ptcp883 It felt to me like Fraser was arguing a different point. He seemed to argue "does this explain the Fermi Paradox?" whereas the guests seemed to be ranking based off of perceived/logical likelihood. "We're Alone" absolutely explains everything, but still seems to me to be laughably inadequate as a logical solution unless several other factors are also involved (like Great Filters, Interstellar is impossible, etc.)
The universe abhors one-offs. If it happened here, it happened somewhere else as well. I refuse to subscribe to the 'We are alone' explanation, as it is more improbable that we are alone. Maybe a better explanation is that we are alone in this part of the galaxy, or we are the only ones in this galaxy, but if every galaxy had only one civilization, there would be at least two trillion advanced civilizations in the observable universe. Yet, we are just too far apart to ever communicate or detect one another.@@fellknight
@@fep_ptcp883 You don't have to imagine that. For all intents and purposes that is literally the case. The only thing sad about it is assuming the worst in everyone past, present and future because of shitty people around you now.
@@fellknight I noticed that too, and it was most pronounced to the "We're Alone" solution segment, to the point where I felt like they should have called it something else when I assumed they were all arguing for or against it's likelihood of being true. I was absolutely shocked by Fraser giving it an S rank in that case, but it is basically the best answer for specifically answering the Fermi Paradox itself.
All Startrek aliens came up at about the same time. Except the Bejourans sucked since before humans walked upright.
I love it how the "scientists" think that our technology would see through much more advanced technology
1:20:00 "Too imperialist" -- This is a fallacious argument from consequences. Really out of place in the conversation.
If this zoo hypothesis should work it must mean there actually are a bunch of intelligent aliens and all of them are both in agreement and 100% disciplined, over long time? What are the chances? Are they not even slightly similar to us, where some guy jump in to the bear pit?
Yup, that's where it breaks down.
And, you know, there's an evolutionary pressure to have at least SOME members of a species being the kind to jump into bear pits. Yeah, most of those die but the ones who don't find new ecological niches or resources.
So you have to have different species who can all agree despite being more diverse than what you see on earth. More different than a moss and bananas. Who all agree. AND you need ALL those species to have internal consensus? Over millions of years?
@@TheStephaneAdam - besides, who will be the crew on these spaceships? Of course, exactly as on ships etc here on earth, ordinary people doing impulsive things when they have an opportunity, there would be someone on earth with a camera when one of these guys eventually can stretch their legs on earth do something undisciplined
@@frasercain couldn't that also mean that when Kirk goes and interacts with primitive planets, when those people go tell others of their kind about it, they just get dismissed as crazy ufo folks... Maybe not all the advanced beings coming down from the heavens crap that is all throughout our ancient history and mythology and religions and just plain old people even today saying they saw weird sky crap weren't lying, or at least not all of them. Boom! So there are beings "breaking their prime directives" all over our history but it's all explained away as myth/religion/crackpot conspiracy theories. Ever consider that?
Maybe there are laser turrets taking out the jumpers before they get over the fence
I think it'll turn out to be one of two things. The Dark Forest idea is plausible. Assuming there have been advanced civilizations out there, there has had to be at least one case of one civ wiping out another one. This would mandate that all of the remaining civs assume a Dark Forest scenario approach. But my first choice for explanation is that we just don't know what to look for. Everyone says we've been looking and haven't detected anything. We've detected lots of things in the universe. We might not understand what we're truly seeing. Some animals don't realize they are looking at themselves when they look in a mirror. They lack the capability to grasp what a reflection is, or maybe they don't have any sense of self. Maybe we humans are also lacking a key element that is needed to recognize extraterrestrial life when we detect it.
Fraser on the great filter: I don't want to think that we are doomed to self-destruction, so I give it A tier. Fraser on self-destruction: This is what Carl Sagan worried about. Preach. S tier. Huh?
There is a fairly obvious most-likely answer to the Fermi Paradox. First of all, intelligent life is either very rare or astronomically rare. In combination with that, because aliens are bound by the same laws of physics that we are, it is exceptionally hard for them to A, travel interstellar, B, see that our planet has evolved to industrialization (only 200 light years distance observable from their telescopes), C, communicate with us because, again, they would likely need to be within 200 light years to even guess that we might have radio or similar communication, and how does an advanced civilization communicate over 1000 or 1 million light years?, D, an element of the Prime Directive where, because it takes so much work and effort for them to communicate with us, they are far more interested, even ethically, in observing us rather than intervening.
Any radio signals we make would be soon lost in the vastness, just like hiker calling out in a dark forest. The distances make the idea of interstellar war/trade/settlement ludicrous. I think if we invent space-habitats and bejewel the solar system with them we'll do just nicely. Or maybe, just maybe, live within our means on planet Earth.
The answer to the Fermi Paradox is so simple (as per Occam's Razor): space is so much bigger than we can comprehend, if there are any others out there, it’s unlikely we’d ever see them. Using the needle in the haystack apology, the haystack is so unimaginably big, and the needle so small, even if the aliens were super advanced, the time it would take to statistically find one would probably be thousands or millions of years
But you havent explained why the needle is so small. There are trillions of earth-like planets within our observable universe, why would only one of them produce intelligent life?
@@vertigo2893 because of the tens of thousands of stars we’ve surveyed using Kepler, tess and others - we’re yet to find an Earth analogue. Our proverbial needle is so small, simply because space is so big and so vast. And that’s without even factoring in the time lost to the limit of light speed
@@BlinkRazor But we have found earth like planets, like LHS475b. Its obviously incredibly hard with our current tech to see planets at trillions of kilometer, heck, we are not even sure yet how many planets there are in our own solar system! That doesnt mean we dont know that there must be billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone and literally quintillions in the observable universe. And it doesnt mean we shouldnt be able to detect signals from them if any of them have advanced civilizations. Yet so far none of them seem to transmit any intelligent EM radiation and none of them seem to have launched von neumann probes. That requires a better explanation than "small needle".
Advanced civilisation would expand exponentially in all directions to maximize its chances of survival. For example at only 0.1c you could colonize an entire galaxy within a million years. So for example if such civlisation existed 1 billion years ago, lets say 500 million light years away, then we should already be able to see them. Because a huge area in our sky would have infrared light from Dyson spheres and show other technosignatures..
@@kyjo72682 Ok, but if that advanced civilization developed a billion light years from us and has only been colonizing for say, the last 100,000 years? What evidence would we see right now? It seems alot of the Fermi Paradox solutions, especially the more pessamistic ones play fast and loose with just how vast the universe is and how little of it we've actually seen.
They acknowledge that the universe is billions of years old and expanding faster than the speed of light, but then act shocked that we haven't found proof in the last 100 or so years we've been looking, and that our ability to "look" in general is basically the equivalent to sticking your nose out a window in New Jersey right now to see if you can smell(and determine the flavor of) a pie baked in Zimbabwae 3000 years ago.
Wow, you guys pondered this answer a while and this reply only allows me so much text. Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed all the philosophical possibilities of your podcast very much. I often tell my son that, "I don't know" is not only a sufficient term but one that more folks should use. Although you should not allow that answer to keep you from looking for solutions, testing your theories and humbly exchanging thoughts and facts. I believe that curious imagination is the key to the intellect that will propel mankind forward. That said, I simply and humbly believe that the sample size of where we are looking, the amount of time we've been actively searching, the immense size and vastness of our visual universe and how far away any species has to travel to say "hi" combined with the tools necessary for either side to look or travel out to do so and the problems either would have finding and conservatively using the energy needed to do something as insignificant as "reaching out to touch someone" and hoping it won't turn out to blow up in either of our faces by destroying each other should we meet, to have more negative possibilities than positive for beings obviously more advanced than we. Time and distance simply doesn't work in our favor biologically. After observing our species in my limited time here, I wouldn't want to meet the angry little humans that monetarily have base everything on a need to be in control of everything. The universe is very dangerous and out of control to say the least and we, as aliens, are already more advanced than humans; so we need to meet them for what good reason? But most of all, relatively speaking, should you compare the vastness of space to the vastness of say, our oceans, we know factually that the ocean is full of life, but if you drop a bucket on a string into the water and reel it up, you will NEVER come up with a fish, but I'm sure they are there. You need more time, a bigger bucket or a very long spool of fishing line and very convincing bait to get some fish. Then hope the game is catch and release or the cunning little humans that lured us in are going to want to eat us to replace that energy they used trying to catch fish all day, mount us on the wall for posterity or want to keep us as pets in a tank. Not much good can come of it statistically if you were looking at it from the point of view of the little green guys. Things being equal and usually what they seem, the sample size is just not big enough and we haven't been fishing all that long. Fire is hot, ice is cold, space and time are vast and like Billy Bob Thornton said in Armagedon "...the U.S. budget allows us to observe about 1% the sky and beggin your pardon Mr. President, but it's a big ass sky." We already can prove that microscopic life and /or the building blocks of life resides on asteroids and breaks our atmosphere often. There is most certainly life out there, the math allows for craploads of it, both intelligent and in our case sometimes not so intelligent. Our lives are EXTREMELY short and it's likely our time will have passed to enjoy the moment we run across each other. But I do believe, it is bound to happen, may already have or will one day soon at a theater near you or maybe, just maybe we were not meant to know and "I don't know" will have to sufffice until the book has been read, the knowledge is bequeathed and the math allows us the proper tools or vice versa. I can only keep doing the math I understand and hope I'm here when the mothership arrives. Or departs.
Dont know if I missed it, but is giving the Ferme Paradox a grade yet not taking the Drake equation into consideration? "If we are all alone out there, sure seems like huge waste of space. Alright, alright. Universe is definitely bigger than Texas."
the solar system has a timeline you need to expand out of it before the solar area becomes uninhabitable.
no worries, we still have time
@@krumuvecis says every civilization until they realize how hard it is to outrun a sun
It's also necessary to expand because cataclysms like impacts are capable of taking out an entire world's stock of life.
18:15 what if that is the void regions of space like Bootes?
Something that eats Stars
I'm really glad you were the voice of reason in this, Fraser! I would've been screaming at my screen way more if you hadn't been there! ❤
Zoo hypothesis is a poor solution. My favorite is simply the vastness of space and time. They are there (or were there or will be there) but it is like the chances of an emperor penguin naturally encountering a T. rex.
Great simile! 🤓 I think you're right. We don't know how common life is, or how common spaceflight is. I expect they are rare and vanishingly rare. The Universe is monstrous big. Life could be popping up and dying out all around and we'd never know.
@@tonytaskforce3465 Agree 100%. My personal; hypothesis that the vast majority of all planets are sterile, but a small percentage have some form of life on them, leaving literally millions of planets with microbial life) . Only a very small percentage of those would harbor any multicellular life. Only a very small percentage of those will have life analogous to insects etc. Only a very small percentage of those would have animals with any sense of forethought, such as a coyote or elephant. Only a small percentage of those would have life that would could create primitive tools. Only a small percentage of those would have life that could create fire at will. Only a small percentage of those would have anything that resembles civilization, such as buildings and government. And only a small percentage of those would have technology to the level of radio communication, and only a small percentage of those would be space faring, and only a small percentage of those would also exist at the same time as us or each other, leaving almost zero chance of any two space faring civilizations from encountering one another.
Octopi have arms. I can see them evolving into something formidable given another billion years.
People complain that octopi are unlikely to have discovered fire, but that's short sighted. We can't live in a steel furnace. It's an artificial environment that we construct to hold the fire. Octopi can function on land, and there is plenty of firewood on the beaches. Even more in preindustrial times.
Octopuses. No need to thank me.😃
@@stoobydootoo4098 What a relief. I would have shouldered that debt forever before parting with my precious thanks.
@@justfelloverJust as well that I used to be a Debt Counsellor/ Consumer Rights specialist then.
I agree with Fraser. The rare Earth hypothesis is the most compelling in my view
Great filter is natural selection. It is also an argument for why we should find a few, very intelligent species, because every impact, mass extinction, cosmic conditional filter, will prune the dumb life and select for intelligent / adaptable life. That filter doesn't need to mean nobody at all, just nobody anywhere near us (at least very unlikely) -- the most likely answer by this logic is that we're the first/only in our galactic neighbourhood, but not the universe.
I love the concept, and I like the people.
As much as I enjoyed the conversation, there are sadly some sore spots all over the place, you could improve on in another round:
The rules of the discussion are not clear enough to your parcipitiants, leading to logical inconsiticies in the rating process.
Mostly, solutions get mixed up. For example, in the "interstellar is impossible" hypothesis the question of timespans is irrevelvant. Longlivety or stabilety of civilisationsiare other possible solutions. If you use another hypothesis to dismiss the one on hand, you can mix up an arbitrary number of solutions to defuse the fermi paradox. Of course, in reality, if we are alone, it will most probably be an interplay of factors that led to a universe mostly devoid of technological civilisations. But that is not the point of this discussion. A tier list is usefull to lay a basis to a more complex discussion, if you jump ahead to complex arguments, combinig items, istead of comparing them one to one, your tier-list gets kind of useless
There are some other flaws. "I don't like this argument" should not count as a viable basis for discussion. Or, if you (like me) enjoy the entertaining aspect of this and/or other decisions based on reflected subjectivism, you could gamefy it and give everyone three subjectivity-jokers to employ during the course of the discussion.
My point is: Please do this format again, I enjoyed it A LOT! But change it, treading it as a game, developing its form episode to episode.
Also, you could keep all participiants as co-hosts, it would be great to watch them evolve as players over iterations of this game. Perhaps you could even sometimes adopt roles, like "avovcatus diabolus" or "galactic prosecutor". Or sometimes invite guests like David Kipping, Isaak Arthur or my beloved John Michael Godier, perhaps being put in the role of protagonists to be cross-examinied or playing "against" the antagonistic hosts.
As you see, I loved the unique video and wish you the best of luck with experimental formats on your channel.
Easiest solution: We are not looking
Well, we have looked at a couple stars. A couple stars is not even a dip.
Yeah it was too much of that in this discussion. Like interstellar travel being impossible getting an A.
Bruh, they figured out how to get to Proxima in 100 years using Nuclear Pulse Propulsion…in the 70s. And that was us using bombs not requiring fusion, the hard part. Politics is the main reason we haven’t already built a probe and sent it to Proxima.
@@maniacslap1623 True, but the hypothetical isn't the same as practical application. Maybe sending unmanned probes is the easy part, but actually colonizing(or even seeding life without actually moving the intelligent life to another star system) is what inevitably falls apart. Similar to the Great Filters(or it is in itself a filter), it could just be that trying to expand takes so longer with such a high rate of failure that given billions of years, in all the places we've looked so far, intelligent life as we understand it just hasn't been able to establish a Galactic Empire of sorts.
This. Universe is teeming with life.
@@GiggaGMikeE great response fam. I’d counter your statement of practicality with this.
The voyager probes have been going strong for about 50 years. Building something that could last 100 years is doable in practice. The whole subject of what’s practical or not would depend on who/what you’re asking.
Imagine a race of people that don’t understand the concept of something like war. They’d be a lot more open to something like nuclear pulse propulsion than we were in the middle of the Cold War.
Or a race with no concept of money. They wouldn’t get hamstrung on something like a budget.
A race with a 300 year lifespan, what would be practical for them?
All that to say, there’s a ton shyt that holds humanity back. What’s practical or not is very subjective. If we found out the whole solar system was being vanquished in a millennia, a lot of shyt becomes practical lol
Advanced spacefaring civilization are likely exceedingly rare in the current era so we shouldn't be surprised when we look further back in time at distant galaxies with our modern but still primitive tech that we don't detect much of anything and even when we think we've found unusual anomalies/signals our tech currently isn't sensitive enough to make/confirm the type of unambiguous conclusions we are after, just look at the phosphine detection on Venus even though Venus is next door, kinda makes humanity seem a little impatient and delusional with that context in mind.
In any case what we likely have here is a galaxy where microbial life does emerge more than a handful of times but long lasting space faring civilizations don't. Not only that but when they do rarely come into being they are hopelessly diluted by the vastness of both space and time so extinction comes long before interactions or even detectability becomes feasible so in short its a combo of a few solutions great filters (cosmic scale natural selection), physical constraints on space travel, very rare intelligent space faring civilizations, maybe we are a bit early, our instruments still have a ways to go and something no1 wants to consider and that is building obvious/detectable sprawling megastructures we like to imagine isn't actually feasible, practical, incentivized or safe.
Anyway great topic & guests would like to see more with other astronomy/astrobiology related science communicators and experts.
Woot! Dr. McTier is back! Always good to see her! Great to see Dakota Tyler back too!
My personal fav is that FTL tech works and when developed aliens use it to vacate dangeous galaxies.
"Interstellar travel is too difficult" is the obvious answer. It's not impossible, but without FTL all of those sci-fi dreams of interstellar civilizations are SUPER silly.
The whole "If one in a thousand makes it then someone has to explore everything" argument doesn't make sense. It's a massive amount of energy, resources, and time and nobody has unlimited versions of any of those. One doesn't follow the other at all.
You get new resources from new star systems. You don't need unlimited, just enough to get to the next star system.
think your forgetting the billions of naturally forming fusion furnaces that are just begging to be used as a resource.
"Interstellar travel too difficult" is probably the least plausible idea of them all.
We already have sufficient technology to do it, albeit slowly. And nobody says aliens can't be a little more patient.
Even humans in the past thought nothing of building monuments that would take decades, or occasionally even centuries to complete. And that's all you need to get from one star to the next. Even with present day technology.
@@frasercain That's a new group of people who'll go on their own path. How does one form a coherent international civilization when nobody can talk to each other, much less have any real influence?
Time can't be discounted here. Civilizations can live in die before someone could send a physical thing from one star system to another.
With a sufficiently self-contained habitat, relativistic speed is unnecessary. Just lots of time, which the universe is happy to supply.
I read the Three-Body books by Cixin Liu and wanted to point out there was a misunderstanding.
Dark Forest doesn't have a bully species going around, poking fun of the galactic neighborhood. Rather than there being a bully species going around taking from others, the theory suggests that every civilization is afraid of making their presence known, because if they do then any other civilization can launch an "anonymous" strike on the solar system to ensure their own survival. If any one civilization was going around being a bully (being a LOUD species), any other civilization could launch an attack (the book suggests photoids) to eliminate the threat. There are no "bullies", the threat is everyone else.
40:32 this is what i believe,
we are the first intelligent civilization, and the universe are ours to conquer
We may not be the first intelligent civilization, probably even far from it. 'Intelligent' In the confines of the fermi paradox means the ability to spread throughout interstellar space, and manipulate solar systems to our whims. If there were civiliazations out there like us, it would be almost impossible for them to see us in our current technological state.
It's very possible to have an intelligent civilization without space travel. Humans did it for thousands of years. Dinosaurs proved being big and bad was better than being smart. It also takes a very long time for evolution to happen. We may be the lucky ones in our corner of the galaxy.
We're not even #1 on Earth, more like #7 or #8, and that could be generous, since our own human bias on what constitutes intelligence is inescapable. We created the test with us as the definition of intelligence, how laughably ignorant of us.
Very arrogant.
You guys know it would take us over 100,000 years to get to the next star system. That's not even 0.00000001% of the possibly infinite universe.
Simulation theory. You surmise that the entire universe would have to be simulated, and that would take more power than the universe to create. Consider that you only have to simulate those parts of the universe that is being observed by humans at any one time, not all of it.
Yes! And really, you don't even need to do a proper simulation in most cases - you just need to make the monkey believe it. For the average dude on the street, that might be no more than some light hypnosis to ignore the inconvenient bits. Keeping the secret might be a tad harder for all those pseudo-autonomous space telescopes and land observatories recording stuff 24/7.
A very enjoyable two hours watching this. Two great guests
Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Here is a possibility. Self replicating probes are not possible.
I’d like to think Earth is an anthill in the middle of a dense remote forest . I mean, would **you** look for a specific anthill in the middle of the huge forest in Oregon?
Human beings are looking through the entire universe for habitable planets right now, so yeah I think aliens would.
@@davegold We can only barely get the basics of what might make for a habitable planet in a very narrow scope in our relatively immediate vicinity. We're hardly looking "throughout the universe". It's like sticking your nose out a window to see if you can smell a pie that was baked thousands of miles away hundreds of years ago and determine if you'd like the taste of said pie.
Of all the great SF out there it's hard to believe these educated intelligent people pick such a hack TV series like Star Gate as the best SF on TV, Maybe Moiya should try watching something else?
I've watched all of it. I'd put the Expanse as number one, followed by For All Mankind, and then probably Stargate. Babylon 5 was pretty good too. But Stargate beats Star Wars or Star Trek.
As an animal, I'd say it's simple. The transformation of very intelligent animals to a wise species , can't happen fast enough to make it off any planet successful.
I think if you look at us we're possibly entering or have entered a dysgenic decline.
@@Apistevist fine. Make me look up the meaning of 'dysgenic'.
@Apistevist ok. I've looked it up. Yes ,I agree. That too. When females have babies to good looking men, that have less maturity, intelligents, and low morals. This will tend a society to dysgenics. Crappy public schools don't help us either.
Or, it's possible that what we consider intelligence is actually very narrow and isn't as conducive to a species surviving on other planets as well as it did for Humans on Earth. Hell, on Earth human-styled intelligence can be more harm than good(especially as we evolved). Sound base instincts, high birth rates, with a minimized energy cost seems to be much more viable long term than being able to make tools and ponder reality for most of Earth's history.
there is life out there that experiences emotions and thought just like us. god separated us millions of light years away for a reason. we will never know 100%, but they are 100% out there. does anybody els agree with my take? I love god and science and firmly believe you can love both.
Reality is a simulation and the sysadmins haven't purchased the "Xenotools" license packs yet. Management keeps vetoing the purchase requests.
Nit: Xenotools is a free open source package but they don't want to deal with xenotools because it breaks optimisations.
Regarding the simulation hypothesis, you need to talk to a programmer, specifically a game developer. You don't have to simulate every atom in every celestial body in the universe, you only have to have a good model for each to simulate the relatively few photons that reach us from all of those objects.
How exactly does a game developer simulate a relativistic spacetime? :)
People just don't appreciate how rare it is for life to exist, even when all the data tells you that.
I totally agree. I don't understand some scientists optimism that life is easy when observation says it is not. Not only do we not see life spontaneously occur, our best science has no idea how it would. Observation tells us the steps required from a pool of amino acids to self replicating life are cosmically unlikely. We may be the only lucky ones, just like it appears.
@@brucehansensc And that life is just a blip in time randomly throughout the universe.
@@brucehansensc The problem with something being "cosmically unlikely" means it's also cosmically likely, the cosmos being a pretty big place, with lots of time and space for even the most unlikely things to eventually happen.
@@psterud That's why I choose "cosmically" to show that the scales might be similar. The knowable universe and time are big but finite. Cosmically unlikely does mean what it says. An "ah ha" moment could change the probability. Lets keep looking but believe what we see. Science is observation not faith.
This is one of my favorite episodes. Loads of fun and provided a new perspective on the Fermi Paradox. It's also nice to see really young scientists who seem to have fun in this activity. Thanks so much for all you do, Frazier.
cool video idea
Thanks!
This whole idea that "we should see them" is just so ridicules. If there would be bit more advance civilization then us on Alpha Centauri that is living on earth -ike planet and using lasers to communicate instead of radio waves WE WOULD NOT SEE THEM. They act like mapping 5% of stars in our sky is somehow evidence of something. Its just frustrating to watch SO many stupid assumptions that they made that are just result of very limited human perspective.
Very good discussion. I think the answer combines almost everything in tiers S through C. The exception is interstellar travel being impossible. I think it's more difficult than we understand, perhaps to the point of being impractical.
The thing with the simulation hypothesis... if we suppose that we're really in a simulation, and that the beings running the simulation are accurately simulating the universe we think we're in, we're still lacking an explanation of the Fermi paradox. It still seems like there should be aliens.
We gotta unlock that level, through play or pay.
Well, unless other life was not programmed into the simulation. Or if it was, maybe it's only one "intelligent civilization" per galaxy or something equally restrictive.
Dakotah, 12:30 r.e. simulation theory, "simulating every atom" ... No, no, no; look at QM and simulation together: Not every atom is simulated, if simulation theory is correct. Stuff can be simulated in the aggregate; it is only when we look at atomic effects that atomic simulation is needed. Look at the wave/particle behavior. Wave behavior is simpler, therefore preferred; but when we are looking at individual particles, then the simulation switches to simulating individual particles. The so-called "collapse of the probability waveform" (when observing particle behavior) is simply the simulator changing gears for our benefit. That is precisely the strongest evidence we have of simulation theory: The fact that behavior follows the type of observation. Reciprocally, simulation theory is probably the best, or ONLY way to understand QM: The wave/particle duality is simply an optimization hack. Why *_make_* a tree falling in the forest make a sound when nobody's hearing? Save some cycles!
EDIT:
Circa 23:00 Moiya doesn't understand Dark Forest. It's not about species having evolved to hide or to fight back. EVERY species, regardless of local tendencies or behaviors, is logically compelled to hide, in the galactic stage, given the uncertainty as to how other civilizations compare in war-fighting capabilities. Uncertainty is fully baked-in, given that a civilization can go from bows and arrows to nukes in only a few centuries, which fluctuations can hide behind the latencies of information flow at interstellar distances; and where it can't, it can hide behind physical travel latencies. If you know civilization X is developing bows and arrows, right this moment, and you send a few ships to conquer them, once your ships get there they might find civilization X having anti-matter weapons and whatnot, far more advanced than your own. Dark Forest theory is actually the most logical.
EDIT2:
Last but not least, these Fermi solving theories are not all mutually exclusive. The truth might be a blend.
I am going to make an assumption that Dakota was purposely giving overly skeptical answers for the content.
Noway someone devoting so much time, money, and life to planetary sciences could have such negative imagination to what might be possible.
I don't think we are technologically advanced to necessarily be able to tell if someone has rearranged the stellar background.
My particular sect of Christianity believes that God has far more children than one planet can test, so He has created many "earths" like ours. A lot of these solutions to the Fermi Paradox are familiar to me in a religious context. That said, discussions on the Fermi Paradox always seem to devolve into the same evidence-less speculation and charged feelings that many religious musings do. The Fermi Paradox is a fascinating philosophical exercise in attempting to explain observations without empirical evidence, but without proper - controlled, repeatable, perturbative, unbiased, reviewed - experimentation, it's no more scientific than any other empirically unsubstantiated debate.
a christian god is testing humans across multiple planets..? why?
All fiction requires conflict and resolve. Reality does not.
This!
I found this paper "Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?" quite compelling. Oh and thanks for a great discusion.
I high tech homeostasis would prevent the full civilization from initiating interstellar contact, but it would be less likely to restrain eccentric individuals and dissident groups. Maybe aliens are visiting us but won't talk in the open because they know they lack the necessary authority, or don't want to get mixed up in a planetary society again.
From what I have gathered about the JWTS is that we are actually looking through 2 universes and that is a total trip !
To me the Fermi Paradox solutions break down into two main groups:
1.) We're truly alone/unique
2.) Intelligent life exists elsewhere but we just can't see it yet (or maybe ever)
Group 1 includes things like we're in a simulation and life was only created here to study, or God only created life here, or going from single to multi-cell life is actually insanely rare, or intelligence is insanely rare.
Group 2 includes things like the dark forest, great filter, prime directive, our tech not being good enough, etc.
Some of them naturally blend together, but ultimately those feel like the two options.
To me the solutions in group 1 are the most interesting scientifically because they automatically prompt the follow on question of "why?"
To me, group 2 is more exciting, because it prompts the question How? How can we peek around this limitation? Even accurate Why? answers rarely settle the curiosity.
I can’t believe intelligent ppl still take this paradox seriously. There’s mountains of evidence they’re already here.
lol
IMHO We are early. The universe just calmed down enough to allow life to develop far enough for civilisation markers to appear in the atmosphere.