Fermi Paradox: The Time Problem

Fermi did not account for variables, such as intelligence. I believe there to be many different species that have been watching since one of them manipulated DNA to create our spices. they will not reveal until we grow a brain. If we ever do?

If aliens have only a fraction of our "intelligence" they will realize that for long-term survival they will need to restrict the size of their own population, resource consumption & waste generation to within the sustainable boundaries of their host planet - or suffer the consequences which face humanity

Or do they fragment into multiple civilisations?

Uplifting carrots 🥕 There was a "Lost in Space" episode relating to this. The cast remembers it well!

I feel like time and relativity are the real reason aliens aren't here. In order to come here from far they have to travel into the future as they travel to us and back to their own planet. Even with light speed if they left their planet in 2020 and arrived here in 2021, when they returned home it wouldnt be 2023, it would be the year 3,000,2023. It makes far traveling impractical for their civilization and therefore useless.

The Fermi paradox assumes that Alien civilizations would be eager to make contact with the unknown. In reality, logic suggests that contact has many more hazards than it does potential benefits. Even if only 10% of the 'others out there' are hostile, that's still too big of a risk to take, hence why everyone stays quiet. There is safety in remaining unnoticed.

I think people don't discuss often enough the youth of the universe in terms of the time problem. For example, we were evolving on Earth for over 4 billion years before we became spacefaring. And before you try to say that the universe was roughly the same 4 billion years ago as it is today, consider how long it had been that way. How long did it take after the Big Bang for metal-rich stars and galaxies to form and become commonplace? Initially, virtually all stars were extremely metal-poor and rocky planets didn't even exist. Even today, the vast majority of stars in our metal-rich galaxy alone are too metal-poor to likely harbor life. Completely discounting the fact that we don't even currently have the infrastructure to be capable of detecting any signals we could reasonably expect to receive, it is entirely possible that there just aren't very many senders yet. I feel like we're some 10-100 billion years early to say that us not seeing aliens is paradoxical.

As I cowered below the giant carrot I asked what I ever did to it and it replied you ate my family

I think there's going to be a lot of life in the universe but that it's simple like the animals you'd find in the jungle. Intelligence is most likely extremely rare. There could be a million galaxies in between us and the next intelligent species.

I think you are missing the core of the argument which assumes space faring civilizations are possible and logically speaking way harder to go extinct.
The alternatives to the great filter you propose do not answer the question of why is the entire galaxy not yet populated.
You almost touched on this when you talked about the possible probe stationed close or ancient aliens having visited us. If those ever existed it should be extremely unlikely that they disappeared before populating the entire galaxy. Whether evidence can last on earth or how big our radio sphere is is irrelevant.

This was great. Great voice, narration and imagery.

Insightful.
I also wonder if in discussing this apparent paradox, we restrict our understanding with English words like 'year', 'miles', 'speed', 'far' etc.
Once you exit Earth's stratosphere, these words carry no intrinsic meaning...?

Does this you believe ooparts to all be hoaxes?

I feel we are searching for life beyond our planet when life beyond our planet is searching for life they can relate to. If they are interested in us then it’s a bitter sweat sadness for we are about to learn the hard way as to what it will take for us to achieve any thing close to a Kardishev 1 society for when we do the human race maybe reduced to a population of hundreds or thousands and I imagine this has happened before by accident and we survived but this time may be at our own hand consequently in our search for even more technology. Teens want to grow up quick and take chances and is why auto insurance for boys under 25 is so high because autos are the leading cause of death for that group. We are growing up too fast for our own good

The creatures that witness the death of our sun will be as different from you as you are to spiders.

---Some smart turkey

It’s rumored that at the end of the universe Tay zonday speaks aloud like a narrator “that’s all folks” followed by a chocolate rain on low volume

Our civilization has been here for fifty thousand years.

John surely and definitely we are very Young. Perhaps we will not be contacted until we can control our own galaxy. Why talk to someone who can't use a hammer

The Universe is pregnant and we are the embryo

Isn’t it funny one of the main qualifiers for SETI is if the signal repeats? Yet we don’t send out repeating signals ourselves 😅

I am truly starting to believe the Great Filter is politics and the mainstream media.
The turn everyone against each other until we wipe them selves out.
The only civilization that ever last for any amount of time never makes it to radio technology.

This is the Occam's Razor of solutions. There really is no "paradox"

I dont think there is a paradox

There's a relatively large percentage of the observable universe We can't actually observe The great attractor could be And extremely advanced civilizations tech for all we know

Time dilatation.. If relativity exists, the aliens might have been here 5 min ago according to them, to us thousands of years might have past. We are only here a fraction of galactic time, and space is big, very very big. so its not inconceivable to consider that our insignificant planet, with our limited capabilities, cannot see, on our scale the life beyond. Also, they might choose not to leave a trail, except our pyramids, which today still cannot be explained. See you soon ! :)

By the time we see light from a billion light years away that light could have been prior to an advanced civilization and when we see it they have developed and possibly vanished

Maybe we are a simulation for aliens to watch how they themselves might have evolved

bzzzzzzz....

2 skulls in that rotating earth.

We are in the process of destroying ourselves right now with our TRASH technology. Unless we do a complete 180, we probably won't survive the rest of this century.

Oh dear, intelligent carrots huh? Sounds like one of the more unfortunate episodes of Lost in Space..........

Advanced intelligent civilizations require adversity and a survival of the fittest basis to their life in order to advance forward and avoid stagnation. War, disease etc... are all catalysts for advancing several aspects of our world. In other words a perfect, stress free world would produce little in the way of advanced technology. It's a catch-22. We war, therefore we explore. I see no reason to believe it wouldn't be the same everywhere. We are our own great filter and it just might be that way on purpose.

Unfortunately our civilization and all our technological advances we have attained will be ending soonly due to an orange colored washed -up reality TV personality that has the undeveloped brain of a child.

Beware of aggressive rhubarb. ✔ Got it.

What if they communicate instantly via quantum entanglement? We're still using radio. But that doesn't mean they are.

Considering that human governments are now busy inventing genetic weapons, I've stopped wondering where are the aliens.

Although civilizations may be relatively short lived, simple life and evidence of it can easily last for a billion years. Seems to me that if we find that evidence, then we can think about civilizations....but the way it stands now there indeed is a chance that we are and always have been alone.

This is no where near as interesting as all the compelling evidence for a continuation of consciousness after the death of the physical body.

We didn't have a concept of other galaxies until after world war 1. We are so young and dumb!

Totally real. We have astronomers whining about the great silence when we have just barely begun to look. Even that cool worlds dude is falling into this trap.

I think the time is the first problem, distance is second.

The time problem is that my wristwatches seem to ran out of battery everytime i seriously want to impress someone.

My theory to explain the Great Silence is that the radio emitting phase of civilizations is quite brief because it only lasts until a race figures out how to make communication devices based on entangled pairs and thus get around that pesky light speed problem.

Absolutely riveting stuff as usual, JMG. I was rapt throughout.

... isn't uplifting plants kinda the plot of that old B-Movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes?

Let's stop pretending UFOs are not extraterrestrials.

I believe an advanced technological civilization would only advance a century beyond where humans are today without discovering the ability to move our consciousness into a computer. Once we have that capability, we will have the secret of interstellar travel. We certainly can't travel a sizeable fraction of the speed of light as meat. Further, it should be possible to eventually shrink the size of the equipment to a few grams. It iosn't that difficult to make something that small move very fast.

I picture an intelligent alien life form detecting our radio and internet traffic. They're excited, and are just getting ready to welcome us to the cosmic neighborhood when they happen to run across Facebook.

Aliens might also experience subjective time very differently. Imagine aliens living on a Titan like planet with liquid hydrocarbons as solvent - biological processes would be very slow at -170° and their lifespans might be millions of years. Or maybe they uploaded their minds into computers and operate at nanosecond scales.