Cox solves Fermi paradox: video goes on for 20 minutes about wow space is big there's trillions of stars. Oh yeah and the Fermi paradox is why we havent heard from aliens. Everyone: yeah no s**t
The Fermi paradox is no paradox at all. The fascination with it stems from the inability to comprehend what a microscopic piece of space and time we inhabit. It's like a man waking up on a boat in the middle of the atlantic, spends 10mins looking and calling out in all directions and then asking “where is everyone, am i alone in the universe?”
@@autoclearanceuk7191 no, my scale is not accurate, it's a gross understatement. Even if the guy in the boat was the size of bacteria, the scale still wouldn't fit, not by a longshot.
@@MrLennart1976Right, maybe a closer scale like scooping a cup into an ocean the size of the Sun & saying no fish in this ocean. Probably that's even way to small of comparison.
@@timeames2509 very true. Problem is that most can't even visualize scales like the sun, let alone the cosmos. The human brain just isn't naturally geared for it. Another thing in all this is the tiny fraction of a blink of an eye humanity has been around as a technological species.
@@timeames2509 I'm absolutely positive that the cosmos is teeming with life. I somewhat doubt that technological species are common though. We humans see ourselves as the apex of evolution on earth and therefore think that life naturally evolves towards intelligence and intelligence towards technology. But there's nothing to suggest that should be true, on the contrary.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” D. Adams
@@S_Drake as a kid I had a teacher that told us that there are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand on all the beaches on planet earth ,a lot more,
This comes off as a term paper cobbled together by a junior high school kid by a wide variety of sources. It is not coherent, folds back on itself and dies the viewer and the teased incorporation of Brian Cox an injustice.
Unfortunately you and I are paying this channel every time we watch or comment. When I look at so-called ‘science’ video titles I look for the word ‘terrifying’ or the phrase ‘and this happened’ and I run like hell. Don’t feed the beast.
I think any theory (and these are theories, not "solution" as the title suggests) makes the mistake of assuming that any intelligent life must be detectable by our capabilities of measurement, based on our understanding of physics and mathematics. And therefore if we can't detect any life, there can't be any. Considering that even the nature of space-time is now being revised, the presence of it even being theoretically refuted by certain scientists, makes it a fallacy to assert anything about the presence of intelligent life in our galaxy based on our current methods of measurement. "We don't know and we are not advanced enough to know yet" is probably the best thing we can say. Scientists don't like to admit to this. Or even that, if intelligent life is in the neighbourhood - perhaps even on this planet, and are a species that are so advanced that they can travel to our Earth, then our methods of measuring their presence is likely to also be too primitive to do so.
I've seen some wierd stuff and I was lucky enough to experience a skyquake. I was so scared I didn't even think to record it which is shitty of me. I thought reality was tearing apart above me and I was going to die though, at least that's what it sounds like. It's so loud bass it shakes the windows in my house and makes everything vibrate. And I live in Maine, we don't have earthquakes here. You could tell it was coming from the sky anyways but you have to be there to see it in person to believe it really the videos don't do the sound volume any justice.
It might just be as simple as this: Biological matter ages like milk in space. Radiation kills it quickly, and the extreme cold, micrometeorite punctures, and the vacuum of space don't help. Pair that up with the vast distances, and it makes sense that most life just cannot exist very far from its own planet unless it develops a perfect system to overcome these challenges.
Cox doesn't follow the implications of science he invents fantasy because he follows his blind faith in atheism and science has to fit that. Every talk I see of him he refuses to acknowledge mankinds most proven knowledge from his own field of science the spacetime theorems which establish the universe had to have a finite start thus God. He is a very dishonest person with how he presents the implications of modern science.
@@jameswinburn6843 i mean hey there's always the alcubierre drive that [HUGE LIST OF REASONS IT CAN'T WORK, BOTH PRACTICALLY AND THEORETICALLY] ah! nevertheless.
@@jameswinburn6843 einstein has problems with division by zero, the dude's a failure on the fundamentals of BASIC math. baby level stupid, just like the scientists demanding that the speed of light is a limitation. if you have a pie, and divide zero slices out of it, how many slices do you have? the answer is obviously a set. you have zero slices, and at the same time an infinite amount of slices from the undivided pie, and also at the same time you have 1 slice being the pie it's self. pi/0=[0,.999999,1]
This is the reason why I never took the paradox seriously, it's already solved, but it is entertaining and sometimes even educational to explore other possible solutions.
So two minutes of Brian Cox stating that alien civilizations might have a "Prime Directive" like Star Trek that prevents them from contact or interfering with a more primitive civilization and that "isn't good?' I think it's a lot better than many of the alternatives. Having said that, that has been my theory for a long time. What has Earth got to offer that isn't found on many planets in the Galaxy? The zoo or ant farm hypothesis has merit as well. Perhaps a civilization a hundred thousand years older than ours that has never known war populated by beings with an average lifespan of over a thousand years and an average intelligence level that would make us look like mentally challenged toddlers might just be able to visit this zoo without a handshake or a welcome kiss? Maybe they have solved the issue of interstellar travel in a way that is beyond our capability to even conceive. Nahhhh, we are the first, the best, and the most intelligent. Did I mention the best looking as well? No doubt.
Look at the way we like to hurt each other ! If we can't even live in peace with ourselves how would another much more advanced race see us. I think like savages. It's really like that Star Trek episode with the Gorn where the super advanced alien says to Kirk they will contact humans again in about 1000 years.
we have already been contacted, see chilbolton crop circle. scientists just don't have the framework to understand how, or why. quantum entanglement is messaging faster than the speed of light in the form of a bit(computer science). aliens are intelligent enough to entangle themselves, and their ufo.
Light is very slow compared to the size of the galaxy or universe, and chances are really high that it's an absolute limit which cannot be broken no matter what you do
If we look at the natural world on our own planet, we see that life is engaged in an unending struggle for survival. Perhaps the reason other species in the universe are not engaging with us or anyone else that we know of is because where there is life, there are 'lions, and tigers, and bears'. In that instance, not advertising one's existence increases the probability of survival.
The Octopus is a very intelligent invertebrate that lives underwater where paper, blackboard and chalk, electricity, and fire are technologies unavailable to it. Ditto whales, dolphins. So what are we potentially going to find on the moons of the gas giants? Creatures living under the surface, swimming around in vast seas that are not going to be able to communicate with us using paper, blackboard and chalk, electricity or fire. Eyeballs are a common evolutionary outcome. However, even if we could send them Morse Code with laser beams, the underwater little green aliens are going to have a hard time flashing us back. Water is the great filter - can't live with it - can't live without it.
Exactly also you need to have an oxygen rich environment to produce anything as well. You need to burn stuff for fire, fire to process metals, fire to burn fuels etc. not only would aliens with advanced tech be land dwelling they must also breathe O2. Sure other life could survive with other atmospheres but no fire means no tech.
Its not fire, but intense heat energy that is the prerequisite source for technological advancement. Underwater thermal vents are sources of intense heat energy that can be harvested by underwater civilizations. As far as the opposable thumbs requirements to manipulate tools, octopi possess far more dexterity than humans.
If we are indeed one of the first civilizations, what does this mean for our responsibility to protect the planet and develop technology to expand beyond Earth, to ensure the long-term survival of the human species?
@@kevinmclain6741 Or, at least with respect to our own galaxy, an inevitable consequence of the anthropic principle. Other galaxies might have old civilisations which have colonised their whole galaxy but we have to be in a galaxy in which that hasn't happened since otherwise we could never have developed.
Like I keep saying: Imagine the Universe created the miracle of awareness somewhere within its infinite womb, and then mankind allows religion to run rampant, this incessantly spreading mind virus that seeks to subdue all consciousness. A cosmic tragedy. Letting this happen, even if we're not alone, is a crime against nature.
@@talawanda5164 How would they know to come here, to our own star? Our radio transmissions have only travelled tens of light years. The chances of a civilization capable of such travel within that distance is likely zero.
@@georgecarlinismytribe There's life everywhere... its just that the 3rd lower dimensional fields aren't really used because its a very hard place to be. So they are all observing us and very aware. But distance again is unimportant because if you are able to resonate lets say their ship with a frequency that corresponds to the other side of the universe. And they imposed that sound wave and bombard their ship with it. All of a sudden they will appear on the other side of the universe because location is part of the variable of the frequency. Each spot in the universe resonates at its own frequency and when you can map it its easy. and do you really think that a race that was seeded here by other races is left unatended? Think again.
We underestimate two things: the vast size of the universe which only can be conquered by a technology able to travel faster than light, and the vast amount of time, meaning that most other civilizations may have happened millennia in the past or will happen millennia in the future.
Superluminal travel would be necessary if you want to hop across the galaxy for a weekend getaway, but not if you want to gradually colonize it across geological timescales. You can do the math. A generation ship carrying several hundred passengers (for genetic diversity) could cross between neighboring stars in a few thousand years using drive technology we already know how to build. And if other civilizations in the past died out before leaving their mark on the galaxy (or any galaxy we can see), that means they're dying for some _reason,_ which we haven't identified yet. Nothing we've encountered in our era of the Universe's history seems deadly enough and ubiquitous enough to cause such assured destruction.
There is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents you from bolting engines to an asteroid, filling said asteroid with a couple million travellers, accelerating said asteroid to a fraction of the speed of light, say ten percent, and point it at the nearest star. There is no shortage of asteroids either, nor will these people have to live in cramped conditions. A civilization capable of doing that becomes basically immortal, because even IF a colony goes extinct, for whatever reason, their habitat will simply be recolonized from a former colony a couple hundred or thousand years later. There is no reason why an interstellar civilization would require FTL technology to exist, and no reason why one without it would go extinct. If anything, the slower you go, the lower the chance for any destructive event to propagate through the entire civilization before petering out.
And the fact that the Universe is spreading "outward". Stars and Galaxies are getting further and further apart from each other. We might never be able to perceive any other life forms, even if there are some out there, because of the unimaginably large distances between us that keep on getting larger and larger!
@@zarni66 Yeah, people love to think that humankind is primitive or dumb, but what tells this about themselves? But we don't even know if we're stupid. There's this Fermi paradox, so we can't compare ourselves to aliens.
I think it’s purely that life doesn’t last long enough to escape their star systems. If that doesn’t apply then the next most likely option is that those advanced technologies simply can not exist.
The trouble with the latter point is that it doesn't require faster than light or even travel at a high percentage of light speed to colonise the whole galaxy. Even at really low speeds it could be done in a billion years or less. And even if organic beings like ourselves balk at spending thousands of years travelling between star systems it only takes one civilisation to decide that instead it will send out its replicating mechanical tools/descendents for the galaxy to be full of such machines. And that is just with really slow travel if we can get up to 10% or 20% of light speed then it becomes much more likely that at least some would make the trip and colonise another world (with the descendents of that colony eventually going on to colonise further worlds).
@@davidwebb4451 There are plenty of suggestions that to colonise the Milky Way would take about a million years (not a billion), using tech not that far ahead of us.
@@H0H0H0Falcon It depends upon how fast your colonists can travel and how long it takes between setting up a colony and it beginning to send out colony ships of its own. The billion years I mentioned was for really slow ships not the ships travelling at 10% or 20% of light speed which I mentioned later. (Other things which could affect the time to colonise the galaxy is the availability of habitable planets, whether you are forced by a scarcity of such planets to spend a lot of time and effort searching for them and then terraforming not quite suitable planets, whether you instead forget about habitable planets and instead use local resources to set up space stations around other stars etc).
Another reason we might not see traces of energy use on other planets might be that they've managed to make their technology massively energy-efficient and therefore there is no 'waste' being fired out into the universe. They would, effectively, be 'running dark'.
There is one thing they never touch on. Light intensity propagates at the cubed root of its distance. The greater the distance the much weaker the signal. Imagine splashing your feet in the water in Miami and trying to detect those waves in Portugal. Our radio signals radiate out and into nothing detectable against background radiation just as any other civilizations radio waves would dissipate before they reach us.
Perhaps one should consider the fact that out of the millions of species over millions of years that have evolved on earth only one developed technology, just one. One cannot imagine a hypothesis with just one example. It’s quite probable that life has developed on other like planets given the millions of species that have developed on earth , however no hypothesis of life with technology on other planets is justifiable with just one example out of millions compounded with millions of years. It is more probable that we are a one off, a one hit wonder forever searching for another one hit wonder.
There is nobody else 'out there'. Nobody will come to save us from our own stupidity. The sooner we accept this fact the sooner we will have to find out how not to destroy our planet and ourselves. But, I am pessimistic about the long term viability of intelligent life on Earth.
I’m convinced that if we develop AI, that sometime in the future, it will realize that we are too destructive and ignorant to remain here, because we are destroying the planet, and will do away with us in some way. It is inevitable. I can’t say that I don’t agree with it.
I think the Fermi paradox is a stupid idea. 1. How many planets have liquid water, or aren't irradiated, or can support an atmosphere? 2. Candidacy aside, what is the probability that self replicating structures will form? 3. On a cosmic timescale, weve been here for a few seconds. Whose to say that in the millions of years it takes to develop anything resembling intelligent life that some mass extinction event happens? I don't believe in God, I'm just saying that while there has indeed been a lot of time and potential for intelligent life to form elsewhere, the same also means that there has been enough time for a million civilizations to come and go over the span of a million years back to back and that's still a fraction of the time for which the universe has been around.
@@BarrieHughesjust because the concept of uniqueness in the universe might be some kind of residual pride doesn’t mean that it cannot be the case, nor is it only a derivative of religion or being American 💀
You mean we are the only ones with human technology? Shocking. Imagine intelligent extraterrestrial life without human technology. Must not be very intelligent if they can't create our Supersmart human technology
The fastest human-built craft is the Parker Solar Probe, which is traveling 37.2 AU/year as it swoops close to the Sun in its orbit. At that rate, Parker would take 7230 years to cross the distance between us and Proxima Centauri. We cannot get to them and visa versa.
Well, there's no way we can travel in human form. In time we'll explore new ways to travel vast distances. We supposedly have 6 senses and just don't know how to use our remaining (hidden) senses.
The Parker Solar Probe goes fast because it's on a _low_ orbit; it actually has less orbital energy per unit mass than, for instance, the Voyager probes heading out of the Solar System at much lower absolute speeds. So that's not a very relevant comparison. At any rate, interstellar travel could be accomplished using much more efficient drive technology. We already know how to build ion drives with exhaust velocities of around 200km/s and that can presumably be further improved. It might still take a few millennia to make the trip between stars, but nuclear reactors can supply energy for that span of time. It might be your distant descendants who eventually arrive (unless we can figure out how to make ourselves immortal- likely a cheaper problem to solve than actually building the interstellar vehicle), but the voyage can be made.
I'm glad to see some of the top comments pointing out that the "paradox" isn't a paradox at all. Space is just so mindbogglingly big. And also, we really just aren't making any significant amount of noise. Concepts like our "radio bubble" and "our first radio broadcasts have reached x far" don't account for the fact that all the radio and other noise we make is not even equivalent to a fart in the middle of a hurricane.
The paradox is first it is that the chance for intelligent life is small. Then take our own world, we are very resent to the scene and it appears we will destroy ourselves sooner than later.
I'll throw out a couple of ideas: - the paradox suggests that any planet in the habitable zone could develop life as our planet has done. There are a few unique aspects to earth. The tilt of our axis causes the solar wind to mix our atmosphere and oceans like a big blender, which is likely instrumental in life developing. Also the huge outer planets act as shields against comets, asteroids, and rogue objects obliterating life. Life may indeed be a lot more rare than the Fermi paradox suggests. - We would notice if an alien civilization was sending out a signal we could detect. A signal we could detect would need to be something like a pulsar. Let's say that an alien civilization was able to use something like the Faraday effect to polarize the light from a star in pulses that alien civilizations could observe. What would it cost in resources to produce such a machine and would an advanced civilization want to attract that sort of attention? Would we make such an investment? Would such an emission be directional such that we needed to be in a particular vector from the aliens to receive it? - Let's say that an alien civilization could detect the whisper in the dark that our radio, television, and spacecraft emit (and that is a big 'if' - it is incredibly difficult to communicate with a spacecraft like Voyager that is within our own solar system). What would spark such a civilization to invest the resources to contact us (especially if they could decode our transmissions and see how we entertain ourselves)?
Look around. We are the Great Hurdle. There is no reason to think that any other species, similar to us, is also afflicted with cleverness, rather than intelligence. Like us, they likely ended themselves with the same idiotic hubris that is leading to our own extinction.
The probability that a search for intelligent life, whether by us or a more advanced species out in the region close to our small planet, may have missed us completely in the brief amount of time we have been able to signal our presence electronically is rather high. For example, I spent some time studying the captain's log book of a 1906 voyage by an American sailing ship which went aground on an un-charted reef northwest of Australia. Though only a hundred miles or so from normal shipping routes, it took that crew two and one quarter months to get free of that reef, and be once again sailing in commonly traversed shipping lanes. Once that happened they were rescued by receiving needed supplies from a passing steamship. More than 200 American sailing ships of that sort, still active near the end of the age of steam by carrying coal to depots for the more direct steamships, or other non-urgent cargoes, went missing in that era with no record of where, or how they became unable to complete their voyages. If humans can miss each other on ships at sea even in heavily traveled corridors of commerce, and with tall masts easy to be detected by, what chance have we of being found or finding any other species, especially one that does not wish to be found.
We stick out like a sore thumb. An nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere with water leaking powerful EM radiation in all directions. We haven't seen anything even close.
In regards to the Fermi paradox, and given the mathematical equations & scientific theories of the past by people like Einstein & Stephen Hawkins, the only logical conclusion that we as humans can scientifically/realistically and logically conclude when all is said and done and the math is properly done is that I like turtles.
It's the bloom effect. If I plant a garden, everything blooms at essentially the same rate. Life elsewhere is blooming at the same rate we are, hence why we have not detected and vice versa.
With current rate of exploiting earth resources we will cease to exist in present form roughly in 100 years , our ability to detect other forms goes back cca 50 years ,short window indeed just spark in history .
A good measure of time is to equate the Earth's existence to the Bible, now go to the last page & half way down is when mankind first appeared on our planet. We as a species haven't been around very long at all.
I subscribe to the Monty Python dictum on aliens; “Let’s hope that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space because there’s bugger all down here on Earth.”
Another theory is that if there were life that rose to a civilization it would be nothing we comprehend. They are probably wise enough to have pleasure on their world that leaving it has not be considered. Another is that we are alone. And instead of looking beyond ourselves that we stop destroying ourselves and our world.
The Fermi paradox is a simple way of telling that the whole universe is there for us, to discover, and play with to keep us interested and busy to become good human beings till we finally unite with our maker. Kierkegaard said it in a slightly different manner:"The only difference between God and the good man is time."
We all still live in the same universe bound by the same rules. It wouldn't be far fetched I guess that if an intelligent alien race were to be around for long enough they would figure out a thing or two out and perhaps bend space and time. At that point you have to ask yourself why would they ever bother caring about lesser beings such as us in the first place? It could also be that instead of spreading out like a cancer across the galaxy they've learned to leave nature alone and do minimal damage. We've started to realize this ourselves as we're making species go extinct and destroying everything in our path(including ourselves) on this planet. Look at us humans, what kind of aliens would want to interact with us? Maybe in the far away future some aliens get the signals we've been sending out and figure out where we are and they come visit us, but something tells me that won't be a friendly visit.
Someone has to be first. If it's us, we need to choose if we want to be gardeners or strip miners. If it''s not us, we need to hope we meet gardeners first.
No apologies needed - I did not see this answer before:). I was looking for a comment like your's and found it. They have higher technologies, because they are way more intelligent than humans. Is that so surprising to believe?
The fact of the matter is that the data for alien civilizations has been around for about a decade. But the problem is that the model of physics through which we are viewing that data is incorrect. When you look at the GW150914 observatory data within a purely Newtonian paradigm; then you will realize that seeing as though black holes are an entirely illogical idea, that observation data, can only be advanced high-powered alien technology. The details of that analysis are on my channel.
I think it's very rare for an intelligent life not lead to its own extinction. And if one was capable of evolving itself past the point that most end themselves, they would most likely go down a different path than we are capable of choosing. They may not even concern themselves with traveling the cosmos or off their own planet. We are looking at everything from a very limited perspective because we think we have chosen the right paths for us to become how we are and therefore this is the only perspective.
The problem is as we were warned. Knowledge has been growing since the first organism strung a few neurons together then suddenly we reach a threshold and opportunities far beyond what any life has ever known appear. We are in a position to take advantage of it but are we ready, can we handle such power, are we equal to the responsibility? Clearly not, but can we do what is necessary to be what we need to be? "You will surely die", a warning, not a threat, not a commandment and pretty freakin obvious when you think about it. They were trying to prepare us, to prepare a way for us, those who saw, recorded as best they could in the language of the day.
Due to the size of the universe which could very well be infinite even a dramatic decrease in the frequency of life per light year cubed would still result in an unthinkable amount of planets with life. We have searched less than one grain of sand among all the grains of sand on Earth. Assuming anything from so small a search is incredibly ignorant statistically.
@@kevinmclain6741 My hypothesis is not invalidated by your comment. I still hold that intelligent life is much rarer than we would suppose from the Drake equation. Also, current understanding is that the observable universe is indeed finite (93 billion light years in diameter). I take your point though.
@@CorvusHyperion I don't think that forming hypotheses that can't be tested has much value. Our current technology gives us the ability to search one single grain of sand without a solid idea of what we are actually looking for among all the grains of sand on planet Earth. Forming any hypotheses or conclusions from this amount of information is pretty silly.
That requires a far more complex reality that the plainly obvious: the uninterrupted evolution of life for billions of years in a suitable environment is far less likely than we think.
That is a greater probability. We may be technologically advancing, but we are socially primitive and don't look like we will ever evolve beyond our primitive social beliefs and ego-centric nature - which makes our species unbelievably dangerous and it it not inconceivable that a sufficiently advanced civilisation would most likely not want anything to do with us.
I agree. A lot of humans have made it a horrifying experience. I would never come to a planet like this if I had the choice consciously. I never had kids because no way would I want them to be here. It's HORRIFYING. Superbly horrific and disgusting.
The probability of technically advanced life within 1,000 light years of Earth is effectively zero. For the galaxy as a whole there maybe ten certainly no more than 100 and quite possibly just one.
@@petermeyer6873 So what's the motivation for wanting to live far away from others if not misanthropy? :) But regardless how it's called the point is most people aren't like that and rather tend to live in groups.. so hypothetically, why wouldn't most aliens?
19:08 as a side note, attempting to communicate with another species using EM frequencies that are weak and common place is probably never going to be noticed. A game ray pulse would be noticed. We certainly are intrigued by the ones we observe. That's only if we REALLY want to be noticed by another advanced life form that is capable of generating game ray pulses.
Modern physicists agree faster than light travel is not possible in the conventional sense of travel. So why would we expect to be contacted considering 100 LY is nothing really and FTL is probably impossible without bending space-time?
The rise of artificial intelligence triggering a response from an ultra-powerful alien species to eliminate us is literally the story of the first Star Trek Picard series, which was written by Pulitzer Prize science fiction novelist Michael Chabon. While a number of Internet Star Trek fans spent their days broadcasting their distaste for the series (as modern pessimistic hate-watch fans often do these days), it was actually quite good, especially if you're interested in a story on this topic.
One factor that seems to not be noted is the fact that for many stars and any planets around them are in a realm of higher radiation than is viable for human type life. This makes normal biological forms we would imagine damaged or 'genetically confounded' by it faster than would be usable for forming normal stable group cooperation if they were even able to live long enough to transfer information to others with the same goals. I'm afraid I had a misunderstanding of the meaning of 'singularly' for AI. My head had it that it was a state where AI came to assume it was not able to error in an analysis and therefore would not check itself from taking irreversible actions upon others. Science's theories often get misused when taken away from the very definition of their limitations. Frankly, this is very primary reason to have an open mind of the potential of the existence of a singular God with a love for securing that unifying nature in a peace that is beyond ordinary understanding, except, perhaps, the child's pure soul. The spiritual may also explain why a superior and sensitive intelligence would not need to travel across space to satisfy any need to relate to another intelligent and similarly sensitive form. They might already be one-ing in a sympathy of equal mental states that quantum entanglement might explain a viability for existing.
Our civilization is as a toddler visiting the Ocean for the first time, as we stare into a tiny salt-water puddle, our mothers words, "There's fishes & all other types of life", we scowl saying "I don't see anything"....an ocean beach 20 meters away...
Our galaxy has a zone in which we are that allowed the development of our civilization. The galaxies that we can observe are unreachable if we do not exceed the speed of light. 
From an astronomical perspective, it is interesting to realize that the Milky Way galaxy is located in a great void. Imagine how different, how challenging, perhaps impossible it might be for life to emerge in denser regions.
The proximity of other galaxies doesn't seem related to how easily life could arise and evolve on any given planet. It might be subjected to slightly elevated cosmic radiation, but an atmosphere stops almost all of that anyway. In other respects, having a bunch of nearby galaxies would create a beautiful night sky but wouldn't affect life in any significant way.
The evolution of life into an intelligent civilization is exceedingly rare, if not unique to Earth. Here's a list detailing the likely occurrences of various life forms in the universe, based on scientific understanding and hypotheses about the conditions necessary for life: - Prokaryotic Life Forms (Bacteria and Archaea): Highly likely - Eukaryotic Single-Celled Life Forms (Protists and Algae): Likely, but less common than prokaryotes - Simple Multicellular Life Forms (Fungi, Simple Animals): Possible, but less common - Plants (Bryophytes, Pteridophytes, Gymnosperms, Angiosperms): Possible, but rare - Invertebrates (Cnidarians, Worms, Arthropods, Mollusks): Possible, but very rare - Vertebrates (Fish, Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds, Mammals): Unlikely, very rare - Higher Mammals (Primates, Hominids): Highly unlikely, extremely rare - Intelligent Human-like Life (Homo sapiens, Hominins): Exceedingly rare, possibly unique to Earth
This question is biased by our belief that a large amount of energy is necessary to sustain our capacity for grammatization. However, as soon as we discover that this grammatization is our identity and that it can be supported by systems much smaller than biological size, the question will no longer arise.
In the same way that our ancestors left traces of their presence, any civilization that exists in the Universe will leave traces of its presence in the Universe. It may be that we have not observed long enough to detect the changes in the stellar environment caused by these civilizations.
What does he actually know? (I know it's a hell of a lot he's one hell of a guy) I believe there are beings higher than us in every possible way. And they watch us human beings and see what a disgrace we are, they also see scientists, philosophers, artists/musicians, writers etc and see how much love they have in their hearts and craft. But as a majority this planet is not even worth observing, it is only worth saving from the people that reside in it. And we as humanity are an utter disgrace it is a great shame. So no matter what theories Cox comes up with or Penrose or anyone else for that matter it all boils down to us as a race a singular race white black brown yellow purple green pink a singular race called humanity. I look at the planet and it is making me depressed probably just as much as the outsiders are looking in with disgrace. 😮 What a wonderful world we live in and what's a wonderful world to invite the visitors if they were to show themselves. To me, it's a joke
My favorite answer to _where is everybody?_ is that most all sentient, sapient life soon discovers they would rather live in *virtual* reality over _actual_ reality because *virtual* reality requires less resources and it's the only reality where wishes are sufficient to be made so!?!!
An advanced alien civilization would develop communication using quantum entanglement. This would result in high speed point-to-point communication, not at all detectable anywhere other than the receiver. Quantum entanglement is instantaneous over any distance, including interstellar distance. If aliens are using this, we may not be able to hear them.
Astronomy has shown that life is dependent on so many factors that well over 99% of all solar systems just based on the sun, its position in the galaxy, the type of galaxy and position in its super cluster of galaxies make life impossible. The factors dependent on the solar system itself make many astronomers conclude that life on Earth is so phenomenally unlikely that there can not be any life anywhere else in the universe. Those who rely on there being so many solar systems that there must be life, usually base their position on the sheer number of planets without any more thought.
In it's actual condition humanity is a danger. Not just for itself but for others too. Intelligent civilisations should avoid any contact at this point of time. And i think that's what they do.
Only SOME humans are a danger. There are actually more altruistic people than there are destructive people. Also, humanity is a danger because we are not united as a species. If something major happened like the discovery of intelligent life, things like religion would likely go out the window. Prejudice among eachother would disappear, I imagine it would be very similar to the Star Trek universe. Or rather, that's how I would hope it would go.
theres really only two solutions to the fermi paradox. the first is that were one of the first and oldest civilizations. the second is that broadcasting into space gets your planet annihilated.
A technologically advanced civilization needs elements that are hard to produce - rare earths. Some very lazy stars need to finish their life cycle and explode in order to produce those elements. The current age of the universe is marginally sufficient for this to happen. Our solar system is probably some of the earliest ones to inherit barely enough of these elements. So yeah... we are early. They may be plenty of life out there, but it's all technologically unable to communicate with us.
2 cents: 1, the human in the current form is believed to have been around for at least 200 000 years now, yet it is only 400 years that humans know of microbes. Microbes were discovered in the wake of the invention of the microscope. One very likely reason why humans are unaware of Exos is that human technology simply is too primitive. Everybody looking is using the em-spectrum, but the resolution of the instruments is abysmally poor, more importantly, em-based tech should be assumed not to be the "pinnacle" of tech, thus creatures that either never started to use it, or have moved past using it, will be almost completely invisible to humans at least until finally someone puts a telescope array in a very wide solar orbit (i.e. greater the orbit of Uranus or Neptune) to bump up spatial resolution and signal sensitivity. 2, stars are not nuclear furnaces fusing away until they bloat up and destroy everything in their neighborhood. Stars are always dynamic, solar flares and mass ejection happen, and when they happen very violently, they do a good job at wiping living creatures off the surface of their planets. For that reason a most life in universe very likely never gets the chance to evolve to the point where it even gets to develop technology.
Riiight... invisible aliens. How convenient. :) And what do you mean "not use em spectrum"? What other spectrum is there? And how would not using em cause them to be invisible? When I close my eyes I stop using em. Does that mean I become invisible? ... Weird logic.
@@kyjo72682 I didn't mention invisible aliens, how do you figure does this strawman help you? There might be other, more direct ways to communicate than by using radiation. One is well advised to remember that while talking heads for the church of academia love to pretend humankind knows so much, the simple fact is nobody knows what matter is. This is obvious when you look how they try to construct matter from processes, but a process is nothing but matter in motion, where matter is more foundational than motion, since you can't have processes if there is nothing that moves. Academics have done a very decent job at finding magnitudes, which in return is enough to have technology, but it is hubris to assume that just because you can calculate how much fuel you need to launch to orbit (just one example) you actually understand anything other than magnitudes at the foundational level.
My view is that there is a maximum size that an interstellar civilisation can maintain due to the delay in communication. I doubt anything spanning more than a few parsecs could be maintained and would rapidly fracture. So what would be the point in travelling many thousands of parsecs to distant civilisations? As for signals we've sent from Earth - the incidental signals like radio and television communications hardly count as they were not particularly strong - by the time they reach the location of any potentially advanced civilisation, they'll have faded to well below background. The only signal for Earth that is worth of consideration is the Aricebo Message, which was transmitted at around 20 trillion watts, but that wasn't omnidirectional, so it could only be noticed by civilisations in the general direction of the M13 globular star cluster. Personally, I don't think there's a paradox. I think that the presumption that aliens would come here or send probes here is incorrect.
In the exploration of the Cosmos, we must be making the full round-trip from belief that this world is all that there is, to realisation that there are billions of other worlds, and then back to colder realisation that for us, indeed, this world is all that there is.
Less large than one might suspect. Worse things have happened. A few hundred years ago, when Sweden was still enlarging its borders, a person wanted to homestead someplace, but he was a loner, so he demanded guarantees from the authorities that he would not meet anybody, absolutely nobody at all. He got those guarantees, and promptly left for the mountains. Once up in the mountains he met another guy, and got sorely angry. And so did the other guy. It turned out that that guy was a norwegian, and had gotten the same promise from the norwegian authorities. And once he was up in the mountains of course he got all the way to the swedish side and met that swede. (Not any relation to me, I'm sorry to say.) It was bound to happen. It takes just one civilisation who has the guts to let its individuals go supraluminal homesteading all over the galaxy to mess up with probabilities. cheers! / CS
@@thecrazyswede2495 interesting story, I can see how they’d both be upset. Actually if you read accounts of alien encounters some are described as Scandinavians , so maybe some of your ancestors got further than we thought. All the best.
There is another possibility that intelligent life exist in the places we would never expect to find one. Inside stars. In fact whole life relay on processing energy in some organized manner. We live on the cold planet where amount of energy is very limited, mostly reaching us from distant star. The most advances creatures want to be as close to energy source as possible, where energy density is the greatest. Lets think about our transistors as basis for AI life. Temperature that transistor operate is withing very narrow marging. But vaccum tubes may operate at much higher temperatures and for example function perfecty on the Mercury planet. But we could still find transistor analogs that operate at 1000 or 1000 celcius. Then quntum physics could come with examples of switching process that could function at any temperature as high as thousand to millions celcius. So supercomputer could function inside our Sun already utilizing molecule switching , quantum tunelling and light in the process. Then another difference is Time at which such entity operate. If could operate at millions degress thousand time faster then we do. The size of such entity also could range from nanometers to thousands of kilometers depending on switiching technique. Becuase our human brains are nothing else that complicated switching mechanism that could be replicated by any technically possible analog. Like distant light interference could stand already for intelligent life form we will never expect.
The irony is that the intelligent entities they've been searching for is right here on this earth but in the dimension mirroring ours, you could argue the subatomic dimension ruled by quantum physics operates from a mirror dimension overlayed over our physical reality. The same argument goes for dark matter an unseen element that occupies the majority of the universe. People who have experienced sleep paralyysis, near death or taken substances like DMT collectively report seeing intelligent entities known by names such as machine elves, spirits, demons, Djinn or grey ailiens. So the flaw of the Fermi Paradox remains that it only focuses on extraterrestrial life not interdimensional.
In the final season of Lexx, the premise of Earth's elimination was based on how the Large Hadron Collider created a particle with enough gravity to form a micro black hole that then devours ever more surrounding matter including the entire Earth. Only God knows how many of such terminal pitfalls civilizations must avoid while progressing?
The mystery isn't as complicated as it may seem... Higher civilizations have been here several times in the last few million years. The last time one of them found organisms flailing in the mud trying for life on land. Time is your answer, it has already happened or it will happen.....
The paradox is still the paradox. There is still an apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
We haven’t proven we can enhance galactic life. We still measure power by its ability to destroy rather than to create. At least another millennium of growth is required.
Has anyone ever considered that a truly intelligent civilization would not care if there were other beings in the universe. They would be more concerned with perfecting their own lives and civilization. With perfecting their own state of existence. Exploration on any scale would require a massive amount of resources which would not be worth the time it would take to compile them. Our very interest in finding life outside of our biosphere when we can not even perfect our own biosphere only proves we are not an intelligent species.
Nature is a good mother, social intelligent constructs not so much. While it's possible that we find a way to build a society that is not so self destructive, the likelihood of that happening in our world or other worlds in the universe is unknown. For all we know intelligent life is a fleeting phenomenon.
The key is this: we must understand that we are not special, we're not at the top of the food chain, and we're not gods on earth. Intelligence from a certain point of view is just... a mental condition, like obsessive compulsive disorder. Think about it, what could make an entity so obsessed with learning, exploring, changing, but a dissatisfaction with it's current identify or circumstance? So the question is, what will this intelligent entity choose as it's destiny, is it ok with it's pre ordained destiny of self destruction.. or is it going to try to walk the extra mile?
Perhaps other civilizations just dont want to explore??? What if other advanced have reached our level, but not surpassed it yet?? What if no civilization anywhere has conquered the pesky distance problem, whether in communication or travel??
It's like taking a press camera to a basketball game that is set on a tripod and loaded with one shot only , to be taken at an unknown random time during course of the game. What are the odds of it capturing a game--winning buzzer-beater?
I've seen a vid on youtube about some star sending some weird radiation intervals (the explanation was that some heavy nuclear materials are being disposed at a star which is causing these intervals in radiation). Theory exist that such intervals in radiation levels are unlikely to be just a coincidence. Anyways it doesnt matter that much. One thing to add is that if I am correct the planets that life can evolve cannot have too strong gravity, that means life can only start at planets which are comparable in size to Earth, this is a massive barrier (venus and mars are examples of planets that life cannot exist although gravity would allow for it). Now 1 good planet per solar system is not that much (probably many solar systems have no suitable planets at all). Life is rare and if we assume that more advanced civilisation can break the laws of physics then we are assuming that impossible is possible?:)
We don't have the answer to chemical evolutionary theory. In fact we don't have that theory yet. It is also called abiogenesis, the question of how inanimate particles and matter becomes biological. This is the real missing link.
Could someone please explain to me, how is "where are all the radio waves from civilizations, if it's quite probable that there ARE some civilizations out there" different from "why is the night sky black if there are trillions of stars out there?" I mean, radio waves and light are similar, right?
Not mentioned in the video but one alarming solution might be that most ETs who CAN broadcast interstellar are smart enough NOT to. IOW, it's possible we may not WANT some ETs scanning the skies to come hither.
![[#2024MAMA] BIGBANG (빅뱅) - 뱅뱅뱅 (BANG BANG BANG) + FANTASTIC BABY | Mnet 241123 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EQsYfiPR9uM/mqdefault.jpg)
Wow. You could skip all the way to 17:00 and still not learn anything new. I love the topic, but this presentation was nothing but word salad.
::::::::::::::
19:02* ( till 19:05 )
*Thanks! That saves time. :)
This is why while adds running I skim comment section. Tanks for your service.
Thanks
@@rubenverheij4770😂😂😂 Thanks. Nice save!
Cox solves Fermi paradox: video goes on for 20 minutes about wow space is big there's trillions of stars. Oh yeah and the Fermi paradox is why we havent heard from aliens.
Everyone: yeah no s**t
The Fermi paradox is no paradox at all. The fascination with it stems from the inability to comprehend what a microscopic piece of space and time we inhabit. It's like a man waking up on a boat in the middle of the atlantic, spends 10mins looking and calling out in all directions and then asking “where is everyone, am i alone in the universe?”
@@autoclearanceuk7191 no, my scale is not accurate, it's a gross understatement.
Even if the guy in the boat was the size of bacteria, the scale still wouldn't fit, not by a longshot.
@@MrLennart1976Right, maybe a closer scale like scooping a cup into an ocean the size of the Sun & saying no fish in this ocean. Probably that's even way to small of comparison.
@@timeames2509 very true. Problem is that most can't even visualize scales like the sun, let alone the cosmos. The human brain just isn't naturally geared for it.
Another thing in all this is the tiny fraction of a blink of an eye humanity has been around as a technological species.
@@MrLennart1976 13 billion light yrs. can't be understood. But to think that we are the only life out of 2 trillion galaxies is ridiculous. You agree?
@@timeames2509 I'm absolutely positive that the cosmos is teeming with life.
I somewhat doubt that technological species are common though.
We humans see ourselves as the apex of evolution on earth and therefore think that life naturally evolves towards intelligence and intelligence towards technology.
But there's nothing to suggest that should be true, on the contrary.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” D. Adams
If we're ever going to find other "life" out there, we're gonna need an Infinite Improbability Drive to do it!
And the mice will be furious.
We need to keep a close eye on the dolphins, and when they go, we follow.
@@S_Drake as a kid I had a teacher that told us that there are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand on all the beaches on planet earth ,a lot more,
@@John-i9j4n From what I understand, that is very true. 🙂
I just lost 19m15s of my life, there is no actual 'New solution to the Fermi Paradox' in this video.
I lost 10 playing it at 2x 😎
@@andrewguthrie2 I lost 2. ive read the comments first 😎
This comes off as a term paper cobbled together by a junior high school kid by a wide variety of sources. It is not coherent, folds back on itself and dies the viewer and the teased incorporation of Brian Cox an injustice.
Unfortunately you and I are paying this channel every time we watch or comment. When I look at so-called ‘science’ video titles I look for the word ‘terrifying’ or the phrase ‘and this happened’ and I run like hell. Don’t feed the beast.
Scroll on
Cool Worlds did this so much better over a year ago.
Isn't that what actually happened though? Except it was an elementary kid that made the paper
@@markuswx1322but the beast is being fed everytime you make comments like this!
There's a good bit of redundance here. I watched the whole thing. I give it a D on a scale of A through F
Thanks. Bye.
Yeah... it was a good way to pass the time.
I gibe it an F
I came here to listen to Brian Cox, not some random narrator.. 3 mins of Cox to 16 mins of rambling.. kthxbye.
@@kellin218 yeah - i lasted until the 14th minutes, i think i wasted time on another video by this channel - time to block it from my recoms....
I think any theory (and these are theories, not "solution" as the title suggests) makes the mistake of assuming that any intelligent life must be detectable by our capabilities of measurement, based on our understanding of physics and mathematics. And therefore if we can't detect any life, there can't be any. Considering that even the nature of space-time is now being revised, the presence of it even being theoretically refuted by certain scientists, makes it a fallacy to assert anything about the presence of intelligent life in our galaxy based on our current methods of measurement. "We don't know and we are not advanced enough to know yet" is probably the best thing we can say. Scientists don't like to admit to this. Or even that, if intelligent life is in the neighbourhood - perhaps even on this planet, and are a species that are so advanced that they can travel to our Earth, then our methods of measuring their presence is likely to also be too primitive to do so.
Your comment reminded me of a quote from Voltaire's Micromegas. "Matter is infinitely extended, but has different properties in different worlds..."
I agree. We're too primitive. Maybe they're in 4D, 5D, or even more. We can't spot them.
this guy gets it
@@riandarmata we are just a spark in the night of Nth Space
I've seen some wierd stuff and I was lucky enough to experience a skyquake. I was so scared I didn't even think to record it which is shitty of me. I thought reality was tearing apart above me and I was going to die though, at least that's what it sounds like. It's so loud bass it shakes the windows in my house and makes everything vibrate. And I live in Maine, we don't have earthquakes here. You could tell it was coming from the sky anyways but you have to be there to see it in person to believe it really the videos don't do the sound volume any justice.
"Apart from hydrogen, the most common thing in the universe is stupidity." - Harlan Ellison
It might just be as simple as this: Biological matter ages like milk in space. Radiation kills it quickly, and the extreme cold, micrometeorite punctures, and the vacuum of space don't help. Pair that up with the vast distances, and it makes sense that most life just cannot exist very far from its own planet unless it develops a perfect system to overcome these challenges.
Cox doesn't follow the implications of science he invents fantasy because he follows his blind faith in atheism and science has to fit that. Every talk I see of him he refuses to acknowledge mankinds most proven knowledge from his own field of science the spacetime theorems which establish the universe had to have a finite start thus God. He is a very dishonest person with how he presents the implications of modern science.
If faster than light speed travel is impossible we will probably never see or hear any aliens.
And until someone proves Einstein wrong, I'll believe it is, in fact, impossible.
@@jameswinburn6843 Agreed
@@jameswinburn6843 i mean hey there's always the alcubierre drive that
[HUGE LIST OF REASONS IT CAN'T WORK, BOTH PRACTICALLY AND THEORETICALLY]
ah! nevertheless.
@@jameswinburn6843 einstein has problems with division by zero, the dude's a failure on the fundamentals of BASIC math. baby level stupid, just like the scientists demanding that the speed of light is a limitation. if you have a pie, and divide zero slices out of it, how many slices do you have? the answer is obviously a set. you have zero slices, and at the same time an infinite amount of slices from the undivided pie, and also at the same time you have 1 slice being the pie it's self. pi/0=[0,.999999,1]
This is the reason why I never took the paradox seriously, it's already solved, but it is entertaining and sometimes even educational to explore other possible solutions.
So two minutes of Brian Cox stating that alien civilizations might have a "Prime Directive" like Star Trek that prevents them from contact or interfering with a more primitive civilization and that "isn't good?' I think it's a lot better than many of the alternatives. Having said that, that has been my theory for a long time. What has Earth got to offer that isn't found on many planets in the Galaxy? The zoo or ant farm hypothesis has merit as well. Perhaps a civilization a hundred thousand years older than ours that has never known war populated by beings with an average lifespan of over a thousand years and an average intelligence level that would make us look like mentally challenged toddlers might just be able to visit this zoo without a handshake or a welcome kiss? Maybe they have solved the issue of interstellar travel in a way that is beyond our capability to even conceive. Nahhhh, we are the first, the best, and the most intelligent. Did I mention the best looking as well? No doubt.
i mean ok you're right but i refuse to concede that boobs aren't the most wonderful evolution in the cosmos, so i think that we should recognize game.
Look at the way we like to hurt each other ! If we can't even live in peace with ourselves how would another much more advanced race see us. I think like savages. It's really like that Star Trek episode with the Gorn where the super advanced alien says to Kirk they will contact humans again in about 1000 years.
we have already been contacted, see chilbolton crop circle. scientists just don't have the framework to understand how, or why. quantum entanglement is messaging faster than the speed of light in the form of a bit(computer science). aliens are intelligent enough to entangle themselves, and their ufo.
Brian Cox is a despicable joke. He isn't a scientist.
Light is very slow compared to the size of the galaxy or universe, and chances are really high that it's an absolute limit which cannot be broken no matter what you do
If we look at the natural world on our own planet, we see that life is engaged in an unending struggle for survival. Perhaps the reason other species in the universe are not engaging with us or anyone else that we know of is because where there is life, there are 'lions, and tigers, and bears'. In that instance, not advertising one's existence increases the probability of survival.
Have you read the 3 Body Problem novels? The Dark Forest theory is pretty terrifying....
The Octopus is a very intelligent invertebrate that lives underwater where paper, blackboard and chalk, electricity, and fire are technologies unavailable to it. Ditto whales, dolphins. So what are we potentially going to find on the moons of the gas giants? Creatures living under the surface, swimming around in vast seas that are not going to be able to communicate with us using paper, blackboard and chalk, electricity or fire. Eyeballs are a common evolutionary outcome. However, even if we could send them Morse Code with laser beams, the underwater little green aliens are going to have a hard time flashing us back. Water is the great filter - can't live with it - can't live without it.
Yes. The messengers are already here.
Exactly also you need to have an oxygen rich environment to produce anything as well. You need to burn stuff for fire, fire to process metals, fire to burn fuels etc. not only would aliens with advanced tech be land dwelling they must also breathe O2. Sure other life could survive with other atmospheres but no fire means no tech.
Its not fire, but intense heat energy that is the prerequisite source for technological advancement. Underwater thermal vents are sources of intense heat energy that can be harvested by underwater civilizations. As far as the opposable thumbs requirements to manipulate tools, octopi possess far more dexterity than humans.
If we are indeed one of the first civilizations, what does this mean for our responsibility to protect the planet and develop technology to expand beyond Earth, to ensure the long-term survival of the human species?
We aren't. It's a ludicrously unlikely situation.
@@kevinmclain6741 Or, at least with respect to our own galaxy, an inevitable consequence of the anthropic principle. Other galaxies might have old civilisations which have colonised their whole galaxy but we have to be in a galaxy in which that hasn't happened since otherwise we could never have developed.
@@kevinmclain6741 🥰🥰
Right!!!
Like I keep saying: Imagine the Universe created the miracle of awareness somewhere within its infinite womb, and then mankind allows religion to run rampant, this incessantly spreading mind virus that seeks to subdue all consciousness. A cosmic tragedy. Letting this happen, even if we're not alone, is a crime against nature.
It's not the lack of habitable planets - it's the mind bending distances.
And time ⏲️
distance is no concern when you understand teleportation. which is very easy to attain for advanced civilizations.
@@Idellphany Same thing
@@talawanda5164 How would they know to come here, to our own star? Our radio transmissions have only travelled tens of light years. The chances of a civilization capable of such travel within that distance is likely zero.
@@georgecarlinismytribe There's life everywhere... its just that the 3rd lower dimensional fields aren't really used because its a very hard place to be. So they are all observing us and very aware. But distance again is unimportant because if you are able to resonate lets say their ship with a frequency that corresponds to the other side of the universe. And they imposed that sound wave and bombard their ship with it. All of a sudden they will appear on the other side of the universe because location is part of the variable of the frequency. Each spot in the universe resonates at its own frequency and when you can map it its easy. and do you really think that a race that was seeded here by other races is left unatended? Think again.
We underestimate two things: the vast size of the universe which only can be conquered by a technology able to travel faster than light, and the vast amount of time, meaning that most other civilizations may have happened millennia in the past or will happen millennia in the future.
Superluminal travel would be necessary if you want to hop across the galaxy for a weekend getaway, but not if you want to gradually colonize it across geological timescales. You can do the math. A generation ship carrying several hundred passengers (for genetic diversity) could cross between neighboring stars in a few thousand years using drive technology we already know how to build.
And if other civilizations in the past died out before leaving their mark on the galaxy (or any galaxy we can see), that means they're dying for some _reason,_ which we haven't identified yet. Nothing we've encountered in our era of the Universe's history seems deadly enough and ubiquitous enough to cause such assured destruction.
There is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents you from bolting engines to an asteroid, filling said asteroid with a couple million travellers, accelerating said asteroid to a fraction of the speed of light, say ten percent, and point it at the nearest star.
There is no shortage of asteroids either, nor will these people have to live in cramped conditions. A civilization capable of doing that becomes basically immortal, because even IF a colony goes extinct, for whatever reason, their habitat will simply be recolonized from a former colony a couple hundred or thousand years later.
There is no reason why an interstellar civilization would require FTL technology to exist, and no reason why one without it would go extinct. If anything, the slower you go, the lower the chance for any destructive event to propagate through the entire civilization before petering out.
And the fact that the Universe is spreading "outward". Stars and Galaxies are getting further and further apart from each other. We might never be able to perceive any other life forms, even if there are some out there, because of the unimaginably large distances between us that keep on getting larger and larger!
after watching this world for many decades, i don't think there is any intelligent life on earth either. problem solved.
And it's getting worse 😂😂 at least take a look at who the "free worlds" have as representation 😅😅😂
There IS a huge amount of intelligent life on earth, just an even larger army of idiots getting in their way.
How original
This idea I agree with. Humans are not intelligent.
@@zarni66 Yeah, people love to think that humankind is primitive or dumb, but what tells this about themselves?
But we don't even know if we're stupid. There's this Fermi paradox, so we can't compare ourselves to aliens.
Greg Egan put it best in his novel, Quarantine: "As for the stars, they were never ours to lose. All we've lost is the illusion of their proximity."
I think it’s purely that life doesn’t last long enough to escape their star systems.
If that doesn’t apply then the next most likely option is that those advanced technologies simply can not exist.
The trouble with the latter point is that it doesn't require faster than light or even travel at a high percentage of light speed to colonise the whole galaxy. Even at really low speeds it could be done in a billion years or less. And even if organic beings like ourselves balk at spending thousands of years travelling between star systems it only takes one civilisation to decide that instead it will send out its replicating mechanical tools/descendents for the galaxy to be full of such machines. And that is just with really slow travel if we can get up to 10% or 20% of light speed then it becomes much more likely that at least some would make the trip and colonise another world (with the descendents of that colony eventually going on to colonise further worlds).
@@davidwebb4451 There are plenty of suggestions that to colonise the Milky Way would take about a million years (not a billion), using tech not that far ahead of us.
@@H0H0H0Falcon It depends upon how fast your colonists can travel and how long it takes between setting up a colony and it beginning to send out colony ships of its own. The billion years I mentioned was for really slow ships not the ships travelling at 10% or 20% of light speed which I mentioned later. (Other things which could affect the time to colonise the galaxy is the availability of habitable planets, whether you are forced by a scarcity of such planets to spend a lot of time and effort searching for them and then terraforming not quite suitable planets, whether you instead forget about habitable planets and instead use local resources to set up space stations around other stars etc).
Another reason we might not see traces of energy use on other planets might be that they've managed to make their technology massively energy-efficient and therefore there is no 'waste' being fired out into the universe. They would, effectively, be 'running dark'.
That would be cool. They bent the entropy curve down.
The problem with colonizing other planets is you need ones with a similar chemical composition and size.
Or you need the science & technology to terraform them. You do realize we are testing all this terraforming tech right now right?
We will likely fail in our tentative terraforming warming and the newly fertile Tundra will mean floods elsewhere.
I don't think we'd be colonizing them in human bodies.
Why not look after the planet we’re on?
@@joyandrews3804 That requires selfish people to actually take individual responsibility
There is one thing they never touch on. Light intensity propagates at the cubed root of its distance. The greater the distance the much weaker the signal. Imagine splashing your feet in the water in Miami and trying to detect those waves in Portugal. Our radio signals radiate out and into nothing detectable against background radiation just as any other civilizations radio waves would dissipate before they reach us.
Human consciousness is the way the Universe gets to have self-awareness.
That's why it's so precious!
Isaac Asimov Quote: Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact ..aye aye! a Ken a KEN ! Aye!
Perhaps one should consider the fact that out of the millions of species over millions of years that have evolved on earth only one developed technology, just one. One cannot imagine a hypothesis with just one example. It’s quite probable that life has developed on other like planets given the millions of species that have developed on earth , however no hypothesis of life with technology on other planets is justifiable with just one example out of millions compounded with millions of years. It is more probable that we are a one off, a one hit wonder forever searching for another one hit wonder.
You make a good point, with one fatal flaw. The unknown is never probable or improbable, merely open to speculation sans decision. Best
There is nobody else 'out there'. Nobody will come to save us from our own stupidity.
The sooner we accept this fact the sooner we will have to find out how not to destroy our planet and ourselves.
But, I am pessimistic about the long term viability of intelligent life on Earth.
Prove that there is intelligent life on Earth. :P
@@callmebigpapa Well - whoever thought to add milk and sugar to chocolate was pretty smart.
@@SelectCircle You comment made my afternoon......too funny!
I’m convinced that if we develop AI, that sometime in the future, it will realize that we are too destructive and ignorant to remain here, because we are destroying the planet, and will do away with us in some way. It is inevitable. I can’t say that I don’t agree with it.
@@lisaspikes4291 But it will spare Christian fundamentalists. So how do you feel now?
We do not know enough to determine the answer.
Yet we will continue to speculate endlessly as though we do. It's just.....what undisciplined children do.
I think the Fermi paradox is a stupid idea.
1. How many planets have liquid water, or aren't irradiated, or can support an atmosphere?
2. Candidacy aside, what is the probability that self replicating structures will form?
3. On a cosmic timescale, weve been here for a few seconds. Whose to say that in the millions of years it takes to develop anything resembling intelligent life that some mass extinction event happens?
I don't believe in God, I'm just saying that while there has indeed been a lot of time and potential for intelligent life to form elsewhere, the same also means that there has been enough time for a million civilizations to come and go over the span of a million years back to back and that's still a fraction of the time for which the universe has been around.
I think life is everywhere in the universe, but technological intelligent life is extremely rare and maybe even unique to the Earth alone?
We may be the first ones to develop.
There’s always this tendency by Americans to think in terms of uniqueness. Could it be the residual effects of Sunday schools?
@@BarrieHughesjust because the concept of uniqueness in the universe might be some kind of residual pride doesn’t mean that it cannot be the case, nor is it only a derivative of religion or being American 💀
You mean we are the only ones with human technology? Shocking. Imagine intelligent extraterrestrial life without human technology. Must not be very intelligent if they can't create our Supersmart human technology
That's an ad hominem argument. Nothing to do with facts.
One universe, billions of stars, billions of planets, 204 countries, 809 islands,7 seas and I had the pleasure to meet you!
The fastest human-built craft is the Parker Solar Probe, which is traveling 37.2 AU/year as it swoops close to the Sun in its orbit. At that rate, Parker would take 7230 years to cross the distance between us and Proxima Centauri. We cannot get to them and visa versa.
So, you honestly believe that our current science is the be-all and end-all of space travel? Really? How parochial....
Well, there's no way we can travel in human form. In time we'll explore new ways to travel vast distances. We supposedly have 6 senses and just don't know how to use our remaining (hidden) senses.
The Parker Solar Probe goes fast because it's on a _low_ orbit; it actually has less orbital energy per unit mass than, for instance, the Voyager probes heading out of the Solar System at much lower absolute speeds. So that's not a very relevant comparison.
At any rate, interstellar travel could be accomplished using much more efficient drive technology. We already know how to build ion drives with exhaust velocities of around 200km/s and that can presumably be further improved. It might still take a few millennia to make the trip between stars, but nuclear reactors can supply energy for that span of time. It might be your distant descendants who eventually arrive (unless we can figure out how to make ourselves immortal- likely a cheaper problem to solve than actually building the interstellar vehicle), but the voyage can be made.
I'm glad to see some of the top comments pointing out that the "paradox" isn't a paradox at all. Space is just so mindbogglingly big.
And also, we really just aren't making any significant amount of noise. Concepts like our "radio bubble" and "our first radio broadcasts have reached x far" don't account for the fact that all the radio and other noise we make is not even equivalent to a fart in the middle of a hurricane.
The paradox is first it is that the chance for intelligent life is small. Then take our own world, we are very resent to the scene and it appears we will destroy ourselves sooner than later.
I'll throw out a couple of ideas:
- the paradox suggests that any planet in the habitable zone could develop life as our planet has done. There are a few unique aspects to earth. The tilt of our axis causes the solar wind to mix our atmosphere and oceans like a big blender, which is likely instrumental in life developing. Also the huge outer planets act as shields against comets, asteroids, and rogue objects obliterating life. Life may indeed be a lot more rare than the Fermi paradox suggests.
- We would notice if an alien civilization was sending out a signal we could detect. A signal we could detect would need to be something like a pulsar. Let's say that an alien civilization was able to use something like the Faraday effect to polarize the light from a star in pulses that alien civilizations could observe. What would it cost in resources to produce such a machine and would an advanced civilization want to attract that sort of attention? Would we make such an investment? Would such an emission be directional such that we needed to be in a particular vector from the aliens to receive it?
- Let's say that an alien civilization could detect the whisper in the dark that our radio, television, and spacecraft emit (and that is a big 'if' - it is incredibly difficult to communicate with a spacecraft like Voyager that is within our own solar system). What would spark such a civilization to invest the resources to contact us (especially if they could decode our transmissions and see how we entertain ourselves)?
Look around. We are the Great Hurdle. There is no reason to think that any other species, similar to us, is also afflicted with cleverness, rather than intelligence. Like us, they likely ended themselves with the same idiotic hubris that is leading to our own extinction.
The probability that a search for intelligent life, whether by us or a more advanced species out in the region close to our small planet, may have missed us completely in the brief amount of time we have been able to signal our presence electronically is rather high. For example, I spent some time studying the captain's log book of a 1906 voyage by an American sailing ship which went aground on an un-charted reef northwest of Australia. Though only a hundred miles or so from normal shipping routes, it took that crew two and one quarter months to get free of that reef, and be once again sailing in commonly traversed shipping lanes. Once that happened they were rescued by receiving needed supplies from a passing steamship. More than 200 American sailing ships of that sort, still active near the end of the age of steam by carrying coal to depots for the more direct steamships, or other non-urgent cargoes, went missing in that era with no record of where, or how they became unable to complete their voyages.
If humans can miss each other on ships at sea even in heavily traveled corridors of commerce, and with tall masts easy to be detected by, what chance have we of being found or finding any other species, especially one that does not wish to be found.
We stick out like a sore thumb. An nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere with water leaking powerful EM radiation in all directions. We haven't seen anything even close.
In regards to the Fermi paradox, and given the mathematical equations
& scientific theories of the past by people like Einstein & Stephen Hawkins,
the only logical conclusion that we as humans can scientifically/realistically
and logically conclude when all is said and done and the math is properly done
is that I like turtles.
You have officially owned the internet. Congrats 👏👏
This is the most logical (& the least pretentious) post in the entire comments section.
Totally agree. 💯
A wise man knows his limits.. a fool claims to know everything.
Very wise post. This is the only post that matters.
It's turtles all the way down, anyway.
Intelligent life may exist or have existed, life may exist or have existed, what we are observing is a fraction of universe age.
A speck of dust in the blink of God's eye
one earth per galaxy would still be a lot
do you know how big a galaxy truly is
It's the bloom effect. If I plant a garden, everything blooms at essentially the same rate. Life elsewhere is blooming at the same rate we are, hence why we have not detected and vice versa.
With current rate of exploiting earth resources we will cease to exist in present form roughly in 100 years , our ability to detect other forms goes back cca 50 years ,short window indeed just spark in history .
When the model T came off the assembly line, We were on top of the world. Enough said.
A good measure of time is to equate the Earth's existence to the Bible, now go to the last page & half way down is when mankind first appeared on our planet. We as a species haven't been around very long at all.
I subscribe to the Monty Python dictum on aliens; “Let’s hope that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space because there’s bugger all down here on Earth.”
Another theory is that if there were life that rose to a civilization it would be nothing we comprehend. They are probably wise enough to have pleasure on their world that leaving it has not be considered. Another is that we are alone. And instead of looking beyond ourselves that we stop destroying ourselves and our world.
We are looking at what was not what is. Our first radio transmission was less than the blink of a cosmic eye ago.
The Fermi paradox is a simple way of telling that the whole universe is there for us, to discover, and play with to keep us interested and busy to become good human beings till we finally unite with our maker.
Kierkegaard said it in a slightly different manner:"The only difference between God and the good man is time."
Perhaps we do not understand what it means to be advanced? This is due to arrogance. We are limited by light. Perhaps they are not.
We all still live in the same universe bound by the same rules. It wouldn't be far fetched I guess that if an intelligent alien race were to be around for long enough they would figure out a thing or two out and perhaps bend space and time. At that point you have to ask yourself why would they ever bother caring about lesser beings such as us in the first place? It could also be that instead of spreading out like a cancer across the galaxy they've learned to leave nature alone and do minimal damage. We've started to realize this ourselves as we're making species go extinct and destroying everything in our path(including ourselves) on this planet. Look at us humans, what kind of aliens would want to interact with us? Maybe in the far away future some aliens get the signals we've been sending out and figure out where we are and they come visit us, but something tells me that won't be a friendly visit.
Someone has to be first.
If it's us, we need to choose if we want to be gardeners or strip miners.
If it''s not us, we need to hope we meet gardeners first.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned: We’re animals, and the Earth is an alien zoo.
No apologies needed - I did not see this answer before:). I was looking for a comment like your's and found it. They have higher technologies, because they are way more intelligent than humans. Is that so surprising to believe?
The fact of the matter is that the data for alien civilizations has been around for about a decade.
But the problem is that the model of physics through which we are viewing that data is incorrect.
When you look at the GW150914 observatory data within a purely Newtonian paradigm;
then you will realize that seeing as though black holes are an entirely illogical idea,
that observation data, can only be advanced high-powered alien technology.
The details of that analysis are on my channel.
Consider this.. There are billions of civilizations scattered across the universe and there is a scientific limit on travel and contact between them.
I think it's very rare for an intelligent life not lead to its own extinction. And if one was capable of evolving itself past the point that most end themselves,
they would most likely go down a different path than we are capable of choosing. They may not even concern themselves with traveling the cosmos or off their own planet. We are looking at everything from a very limited perspective because we think we have chosen the right paths for us to become how we are and therefore this is the only perspective.
The problem is as we were warned.
Knowledge has been growing since the first organism strung a few neurons together then suddenly we reach a threshold and opportunities far beyond what any life has ever known appear.
We are in a position to take advantage of it but are we ready, can we handle such power, are we equal to the responsibility?
Clearly not, but can we do what is necessary to be what we need to be?
"You will surely die", a warning, not a threat, not a commandment and pretty freakin obvious when you think about it.
They were trying to prepare us, to prepare a way for us, those who saw, recorded as best they could in the language of the day.
There are only two possibilities: or other civilizations are there, or we are alone. And I don't know which one is more terrifying.
Was it Arthur C Clarke who said something like We're either alone in the universe or we're not. And either option is terrifying.
I think the frequency of intelligent life in the universe (or even our own galaxy) is very much rarer than initially supposed.
Due to the size of the universe which could very well be infinite even a dramatic decrease in the frequency of life per light year cubed would still result in an unthinkable amount of planets with life.
We have searched less than one grain of sand among all the grains of sand on Earth. Assuming anything from so small a search is incredibly ignorant statistically.
@@kevinmclain6741 My hypothesis is not invalidated by your comment. I still hold that intelligent life is much rarer than we would suppose from the Drake equation. Also, current understanding is that the observable universe is indeed finite (93 billion light years in diameter). I take your point though.
@@CorvusHyperion I don't think that forming hypotheses that can't be tested has much value.
Our current technology gives us the ability to search one single grain of sand without a solid idea of what we are actually looking for among all the grains of sand on planet Earth. Forming any hypotheses or conclusions from this amount of information is pretty silly.
That requires a far more complex reality that the plainly obvious: the uninterrupted evolution of life for billions of years in a suitable environment is far less likely than we think.
Aliens considered us but realized we weren’t going to be around long enough to visit.
That is a greater probability. We may be technologically advancing, but we are socially primitive and don't look like we will ever evolve beyond our primitive social beliefs and ego-centric nature - which makes our species unbelievably dangerous and it it not inconceivable that a sufficiently advanced civilisation would most likely not want anything to do with us.
I agree. A lot of humans have made it a horrifying experience. I would never come to a planet like this if I had the choice consciously. I never had kids because no way would I want them to be here. It's HORRIFYING. Superbly horrific and disgusting.
5:30 “Figures like Elon Musk suggest it may be possible in the future.” But what do people with actual knowledge of the subject suggest?
The probability of technically advanced life within 1,000 light years of Earth is effectively zero.
For the galaxy as a whole there maybe ten certainly no more than 100 and quite possibly just one.
My answer is we don’t actually know if life is natural or not. Life should not exist, but it does.
This isnt even a paradox.
The main reason I work is to efford a life far away from other humans - why should aliens even want to come close?
Most people aren't misanthropes.
@@kyjo72682 Not a convincing argument towards a misanthrope.
@@petermeyer6873 So what's the motivation for wanting to live far away from others if not misanthropy? :)
But regardless how it's called the point is most people aren't like that and rather tend to live in groups.. so hypothetically, why wouldn't most aliens?
19:08 as a side note, attempting to communicate with another species using EM frequencies that are weak and common place is probably never going to be noticed. A game ray pulse would be noticed. We certainly are intrigued by the ones we observe. That's only if we REALLY want to be noticed by another advanced life form that is capable of generating game ray pulses.
Modern physicists agree faster than light travel is not possible in the conventional sense of travel.
So why would we expect to be contacted considering 100 LY is nothing really and FTL is probably impossible without bending space-time?
A child can tell you that. You don't need a physicist for that.
The rise of artificial intelligence triggering a response from an ultra-powerful alien species to eliminate us is literally the story of the first Star Trek Picard series, which was written by Pulitzer Prize science fiction novelist Michael Chabon. While a number of Internet Star Trek fans spent their days broadcasting their distaste for the series (as modern pessimistic hate-watch fans often do these days), it was actually quite good, especially if you're interested in a story on this topic.
@5:29 Please, send Elon to Proxima Centauri! PLEASE!!! That billionaire man-child could herald the end of our entire civilized world!
You want fat diarrhea bacon thing to be the representation of mankind????
Actually, I think Elon Musk should stay here - to remain as a poignant reminder of just what is right and what is wrong with humanity.
One factor that seems to not be noted is the fact that for many stars and any planets around them are in a realm of higher radiation than is viable for human type life. This makes normal biological forms we would imagine damaged or 'genetically confounded' by it faster than would be usable for forming normal stable group cooperation if they were even able to live long enough to transfer information to others with the same goals.
I'm afraid I had a misunderstanding of the meaning of 'singularly' for AI. My head had it that it was a state where AI came to assume it was not able to error in an analysis and therefore would not check itself from taking irreversible actions upon others. Science's theories often get misused when taken away from the very definition of their limitations. Frankly, this is very primary reason to have an open mind of the potential of the existence of a singular God with a love for securing that unifying nature in a peace that is beyond ordinary understanding, except, perhaps, the child's pure soul. The spiritual may also explain why a superior and sensitive intelligence would not need to travel across space to satisfy any need to relate to another intelligent and similarly sensitive form. They might already be one-ing in a sympathy of equal mental states that quantum entanglement might explain a viability for existing.
Maybe we're a creation...?
Science just went out the window.
We are a living Truman Show, put out daily on channel 5 😂
@@Apotrix If it involved Natascha McElhone, I'd be for that.
Likelihood exists!
Our civilization is as a toddler visiting the Ocean for the first time, as we stare into a tiny salt-water puddle, our mothers words, "There's fishes & all other types of life", we scowl saying "I don't see anything"....an ocean beach 20 meters away...
Our galaxy has a zone in which we are that allowed the development of our civilization. The galaxies that we can observe are unreachable if we do not exceed the speed of light.

From an astronomical perspective, it is interesting to realize that the Milky Way galaxy is located in a great void. Imagine how different, how challenging, perhaps impossible it might be for life to emerge in denser regions.
The proximity of other galaxies doesn't seem related to how easily life could arise and evolve on any given planet. It might be subjected to slightly elevated cosmic radiation, but an atmosphere stops almost all of that anyway. In other respects, having a bunch of nearby galaxies would create a beautiful night sky but wouldn't affect life in any significant way.
Once an earthworm declared it was only it that exists in entire earth.
The evolution of life into an intelligent civilization is exceedingly rare, if not unique to Earth. Here's a list detailing the likely occurrences of various life forms in the universe, based on scientific understanding and hypotheses about the conditions necessary for life:
- Prokaryotic Life Forms (Bacteria and Archaea): Highly likely
- Eukaryotic Single-Celled Life Forms (Protists and Algae): Likely, but less common than prokaryotes
- Simple Multicellular Life Forms (Fungi, Simple Animals): Possible, but less common
- Plants (Bryophytes, Pteridophytes, Gymnosperms, Angiosperms): Possible, but rare
- Invertebrates (Cnidarians, Worms, Arthropods, Mollusks): Possible, but very rare
- Vertebrates (Fish, Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds, Mammals): Unlikely, very rare
- Higher Mammals (Primates, Hominids): Highly unlikely, extremely rare
- Intelligent Human-like Life (Homo sapiens, Hominins): Exceedingly rare, possibly unique to Earth
This question is biased by our belief that a large amount of energy is necessary to sustain our capacity for grammatization.
However, as soon as we discover that this grammatization is our identity and that it can be supported by systems much smaller than biological size, the question will no longer arise.
We're in a simulation. There are no aliens in the simulation.
Isaac Asimov Quote: Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact ..aye aye! a Ken a KEN ! Aye! sounds archaic ? x love is
YOU might be.
In the same way that our ancestors left traces of their presence, any civilization that exists in the Universe will leave traces of its presence in the Universe. It may be that we have not observed long enough to detect the changes in the stellar environment caused by these civilizations.
What does he actually know? (I know it's a hell of a lot he's one hell of a guy) I believe there are beings higher than us in every possible way. And they watch us human beings and see what a disgrace we are, they also see scientists, philosophers, artists/musicians, writers etc and see how much love they have in their hearts and craft. But as a majority this planet is not even worth observing, it is only worth saving from the people that reside in it. And we as humanity are an utter disgrace it is a great shame. So no matter what theories Cox comes up with or Penrose or anyone else for that matter it all boils down to us as a race a singular race white black brown yellow purple green pink a singular race called humanity. I look at the planet and it is making me depressed probably just as much as the outsiders are looking in with disgrace. 😮 What a wonderful world we live in and what's a wonderful world to invite the visitors if they were to show themselves. To me, it's a joke
My favorite answer to _where is everybody?_ is that most all sentient, sapient life soon discovers they would rather live in *virtual* reality over _actual_ reality because *virtual* reality requires less resources and it's the only reality where wishes are sufficient to be made so!?!!
I can't wait to have myself uploaded.
An advanced alien civilization would develop communication using quantum entanglement. This would result in high speed point-to-point communication, not at all detectable anywhere other than the receiver. Quantum entanglement is instantaneous over any distance, including interstellar distance. If aliens are using this, we may not be able to hear them.
Astronomy has shown that life is dependent on so many factors that well over 99% of all solar systems just based on the sun, its position in the galaxy, the type of galaxy and position in its super cluster of galaxies make life impossible.
The factors dependent on the solar system itself make many astronomers conclude that life on Earth is so phenomenally unlikely that there can not be any life anywhere else in the universe.
Those who rely on there being so many solar systems that there must be life, usually base their position on the sheer number of planets without any more thought.
In it's actual condition humanity is a danger. Not just for itself but for others too. Intelligent civilisations should avoid any contact at this point of time. And i think that's what they do.
Only SOME humans are a danger. There are actually more altruistic people than there are destructive people. Also, humanity is a danger because we are not united as a species. If something major happened like the discovery of intelligent life, things like religion would likely go out the window. Prejudice among eachother would disappear, I imagine it would be very similar to the Star Trek universe. Or rather, that's how I would hope it would go.
theres really only two solutions to the fermi paradox. the first is that were one of the first and oldest civilizations. the second is that broadcasting into space gets your planet annihilated.
Or there are other civilizations but they just haven't figured out long term space travel, or wiped themselves out before they figured it out.
A technologically advanced civilization needs elements that are hard to produce - rare earths. Some very lazy stars need to finish their life cycle and explode in order to produce those elements. The current age of the universe is marginally sufficient for this to happen. Our solar system is probably some of the earliest ones to inherit barely enough of these elements. So yeah... we are early. They may be plenty of life out there, but it's all technologically unable to communicate with us.
2 cents:
1, the human in the current form is believed to have been around for at least 200 000 years now, yet it is only 400 years that humans know of microbes. Microbes were discovered in the wake of the invention of the microscope. One very likely reason why humans are unaware of Exos is that human technology simply is too primitive. Everybody looking is using the em-spectrum, but the resolution of the instruments is abysmally poor, more importantly, em-based tech should be assumed not to be the "pinnacle" of tech, thus creatures that either never started to use it, or have moved past using it, will be almost completely invisible to humans at least until finally someone puts a telescope array in a very wide solar orbit (i.e. greater the orbit of Uranus or Neptune) to bump up spatial resolution and signal sensitivity.
2, stars are not nuclear furnaces fusing away until they bloat up and destroy everything in their neighborhood. Stars are always dynamic, solar flares and mass ejection happen, and when they happen very violently, they do a good job at wiping living creatures off the surface of their planets. For that reason a most life in universe very likely never gets the chance to evolve to the point where it even gets to develop technology.
Riiight... invisible aliens. How convenient. :) And what do you mean "not use em spectrum"? What other spectrum is there? And how would not using em cause them to be invisible? When I close my eyes I stop using em. Does that mean I become invisible? ... Weird logic.
@@kyjo72682
I didn't mention invisible aliens, how do you figure does this strawman help you? There might be other, more direct ways to communicate than by using radiation. One is well advised to remember that while talking heads for the church of academia love to pretend humankind knows so much, the simple fact is nobody knows what matter is. This is obvious when you look how they try to construct matter from processes, but a process is nothing but matter in motion, where matter is more foundational than motion, since you can't have processes if there is nothing that moves.
Academics have done a very decent job at finding magnitudes, which in return is enough to have technology, but it is hubris to assume that just because you can calculate how much fuel you need to launch to orbit (just one example) you actually understand anything other than magnitudes at the foundational level.
My view is that there is a maximum size that an interstellar civilisation can maintain due to the delay in communication. I doubt anything spanning more than a few parsecs could be maintained and would rapidly fracture. So what would be the point in travelling many thousands of parsecs to distant civilisations?
As for signals we've sent from Earth - the incidental signals like radio and television communications hardly count as they were not particularly strong - by the time they reach the location of any potentially advanced civilisation, they'll have faded to well below background. The only signal for Earth that is worth of consideration is the Aricebo Message, which was transmitted at around 20 trillion watts, but that wasn't omnidirectional, so it could only be noticed by civilisations in the general direction of the M13 globular star cluster.
Personally, I don't think there's a paradox. I think that the presumption that aliens would come here or send probes here is incorrect.
In the exploration of the Cosmos, we must be making the full round-trip from belief that this world is all that there is, to realisation that there are billions of other worlds, and then back to colder realisation that for us, indeed, this world is all that there is.
If there was only two people wandering around on earth the likelihood that they would bump into each other is minuscule. Space is quite large.
Less large than one might suspect. Worse things have happened. A few hundred years ago, when Sweden was still enlarging its borders, a person wanted to homestead someplace, but he was a loner, so he demanded guarantees from the authorities that he would not meet anybody, absolutely nobody at all. He got those guarantees, and promptly left for the mountains. Once up in the mountains he met another guy, and got sorely angry. And so did the other guy. It turned out that that guy was a norwegian, and had gotten the same promise from the norwegian authorities. And once he was up in the mountains of course he got all the way to the swedish side and met that swede. (Not any relation to me, I'm sorry to say.) It was bound to happen. It takes just one civilisation who has the guts to let its individuals go supraluminal homesteading all over the galaxy to mess up with probabilities.
cheers! / CS
@@thecrazyswede2495 interesting story, I can see how they’d both be upset. Actually if you read accounts of alien encounters some are described as Scandinavians , so maybe some of your ancestors got further than we thought. All the best.
There is another possibility that intelligent life exist in the places we would never expect to find one. Inside stars. In fact whole life relay on processing energy in some organized manner. We live on the cold planet where amount of energy is very limited, mostly reaching us from distant star. The most advances creatures want to be as close to energy source as possible, where energy density is the greatest. Lets think about our transistors as basis for AI life. Temperature that transistor operate is withing very narrow marging. But vaccum tubes may operate at much higher temperatures and for example function perfecty on the Mercury planet. But we could still find transistor analogs that operate at 1000 or 1000 celcius. Then quntum physics could come with examples of switching process that could function at any temperature as high as thousand to millions celcius. So supercomputer could function inside our Sun already utilizing molecule switching , quantum tunelling and light in the process. Then another difference is Time at which such entity operate. If could operate at millions degress thousand time faster then we do. The size of such entity also could range from nanometers to thousands of kilometers depending on switiching technique. Becuase our human brains are nothing else that complicated switching mechanism that could be replicated by any technically possible analog. Like distant light interference could stand already for intelligent life form we will never expect.
The irony is that the intelligent entities they've been searching for is right here on this earth but in the dimension mirroring ours, you could argue the subatomic dimension ruled by quantum physics operates from a mirror dimension overlayed over our physical reality. The same argument goes for dark matter an unseen element that occupies the majority of the universe. People who have experienced sleep paralyysis, near death or taken substances like DMT collectively report seeing intelligent entities known by names such as machine elves, spirits, demons, Djinn or grey ailiens. So the flaw of the Fermi Paradox remains that it only focuses on extraterrestrial life not interdimensional.
In the final season of Lexx, the premise of Earth's elimination was based on how the Large Hadron Collider created a particle with enough gravity to form a micro black hole that then devours ever more surrounding matter including the entire Earth. Only God knows how many of such terminal pitfalls civilizations must avoid while progressing?
The mystery isn't as complicated as it may seem... Higher civilizations have been here several times in the last few million years. The last time one of them found organisms flailing in the mud trying for life on land. Time is your answer, it has already happened or it will happen.....
The paradox is still the paradox.
There is still an apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
We haven’t proven we can enhance galactic life. We still measure power by its ability to destroy rather than to create. At least another millennium of growth is required.
Has anyone ever considered that a truly intelligent civilization would not care if there were other beings in the universe. They would be more concerned with perfecting their own lives and civilization. With perfecting their own state of existence. Exploration on any scale would require a massive amount of resources which would not be worth the time it would take to compile them. Our very interest in finding life outside of our biosphere when we can not even perfect our own biosphere only proves we are not an intelligent species.
Nature is a good mother, social intelligent constructs not so much. While it's possible that we find a way to build a society that is not so self destructive, the likelihood of that happening in our world or other worlds in the universe is unknown. For all we know intelligent life is a fleeting phenomenon.
The key is this: we must understand that we are not special, we're not at the top of the food chain, and we're not gods on earth. Intelligence from a certain point of view is just... a mental condition, like obsessive compulsive disorder. Think about it, what could make an entity so obsessed with learning, exploring, changing, but a dissatisfaction with it's current identify or circumstance? So the question is, what will this intelligent entity choose as it's destiny, is it ok with it's pre ordained destiny of self destruction.. or is it going to try to walk the extra mile?
Perhaps other civilizations just dont want to explore??? What if other advanced have reached our level, but not surpassed it yet?? What if no civilization anywhere has conquered the pesky distance problem, whether in communication or travel??
It's like taking a press camera to a basketball game that is set on a tripod and loaded with one shot only , to be taken at an unknown random time during course of the game. What are the odds of it capturing a game--winning buzzer-beater?
I've seen a vid on youtube about some star sending some weird radiation intervals (the explanation was that some heavy nuclear materials are being disposed at a star which is causing these intervals in radiation). Theory exist that such intervals in radiation levels are unlikely to be just a coincidence. Anyways it doesnt matter that much. One thing to add is that if I am correct the planets that life can evolve cannot have too strong gravity, that means life can only start at planets which are comparable in size to Earth, this is a massive barrier (venus and mars are examples of planets that life cannot exist although gravity would allow for it). Now 1 good planet per solar system is not that much (probably many solar systems have no suitable planets at all). Life is rare and if we assume that more advanced civilisation can break the laws of physics then we are assuming that impossible is possible?:)
We don't have the answer to chemical evolutionary theory. In fact we don't have that theory yet. It is also called abiogenesis, the question of how inanimate particles and matter becomes biological. This is the real missing link.
" upon further inspection the answer becomes clear"- definition of paradox
Could someone please explain to me, how is "where are all the radio waves from civilizations, if it's quite probable that there ARE some civilizations out there" different from "why is the night sky black if there are trillions of stars out there?" I mean, radio waves and light are similar, right?
Not mentioned in the video but one alarming solution might be that most ETs who CAN broadcast interstellar are smart enough NOT to. IOW, it's possible we may not WANT some ETs scanning the skies to come hither.